Thinking in Drafts
Or how to be fine without an impossible sequence of events to play out in perfect order
I saw a snippet of writing on Twitter today. Didn’t even read it, just skimmed—but I thought: it would feel great to be writing this. Then I realized the writer probably didn’t feel that way during. The fantasy is of having written, not of writing.
So why does anyone write? There’s something in the mechanistic act itself—fingers keying in letters, watching them appear, the almost tactile satisfaction you feel before any meaning arrives. The problem starts when you read as you write. That’s how attachment forms. Once you think a line is good, everything after it has to clear a bar. Adding feels like an affront to what’s already there. And of course, when you revisit that precious first line later, it’s rarely as good as you thought.
Years ago I bootlegged a Joyce Carol Oates masterclass on essays. One principle stuck: you need to be cascading up and down the altitudes. Write a rough outline. Write the “full” thing. Once you’re done (whatever done means), zoom in. Do it fractally. Then zoom out. It’s a whole dance.
This broke my old pattern. I used to write something I thought was great, then protect it. The cascade approach treats everything as provisional until you’ve seen the whole shape.
I think this translates to thinking, not just writing.
At work I’ve been noticing two modes. There’s sequential thinking: linear, if-this-then-that, path of least resistance. And there’s what I’ll call batch thinking, which is more like diffusion: get a rough shape going, then add structure iteratively.
Sequential thinking has the same failure mode as sequential writing. You fixate on one decision early, treat it as load-bearing, and build everything downstream from it. But if you’d mapped the whole problem first, that decision might turn out to be incidental—an implementation detail, not the crux.
How to switch modes
I’ve been calling it “oblique-ing.” Some skills can’t be executed directly like following a recipe. You iterate toward them, like simulated annealing.
The shift is trusting that a future version of yourself will provide the judgment. Write whatever comes. Think loosely. Trust that you’ll zoom out later and score it, then zoom back in and adjust. You are both the generator and the editor, the stream and the one shaping its banks.
Be kind to yourself in the drafting phase. The oversight comes later—and it’s also you.