Trying out changes in my writing

I’ve already written the draft for the next Gestalt’s Garden post.

If you read my previous note, you’ll know that this is a radical change in my writing process: writing the draft of my previous posts was a much slower process.

Here are the changes I’ve made:

• I’ve written a less detailed outline.

  I started with an initial idea for the post and gradually supplemented it with more ideas. My goal was to write an outline that would help guide the conversation I wanted to have (rather than being an exhaustive outline of everything I wanted to say). It is the same kind of outline I would use in a talk. In this case, I used my Zettelkasten for inspiration and to find ideas that would be useful to me.

  If you want more details of this process, I’ve applied the ideas in this post: How I use Outlines to Write Any Text

• I’ve written the draft from my mind.

  I opened a blank document and wrote the draft in one pass as if I were on a conversation. It was 944 words in about 50 minutes (including the time to prepare the outline). Most importantly, I did not use the Zettelkasten at any point and only consulted the outline when I noticed that I was straying from the thread of the argument (this happened three or four times).

  The idea of writing from the mind and not using the Zettelkasten is not mine: I found it in Scott Scheper’s “Public Erratum: A Snippet From Issue #3 Of The Scott Scheper Letter”.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed doing the outline and writing the draft much more. Most importantly, I feel like I’ve completely decoupled the task of writing the outline from the task of editing. However, I have doubts about what the final quality of the post will be, although this is usually much more determined by the editing work.