When I was younger I thought editing was polishing — fixing typos, tightening sentences, smoothing transitions. Real writing, I thought, happened in the first draft.

This was exactly backwards. The first draft is for the writer. It's where you find out whether you have anything to say at all. Most of it will not survive.

The second draft is where the thinking begins. You delete the throat-clearing. You realize the third paragraph was actually the opening. You discover that the argument you thought you were making is weaker than the one hiding underneath, and you rewrite around the better one.

By the third draft you should be questioning the title. By the fourth you should be cutting your favorite sentence because it doesn't fit anymore. By the fifth, you're done — or you've discovered the essay isn't ready and you should put it back in the drawer.

I now budget more time for editing than for drafting. Most pieces sit for at least a week between drafts. The version of an essay I publish is almost never the version I first thought I was writing. That's the point.

Related: The shape of an essay, Why I delete more than I publish.

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