Writing FAST - Jeff Bollow 2012

Feel the overall effect
Inspect what you have
Strengthen

Great. Now that you’re detached and objective, it’s time to start pulling it to pieces.

To do that, you’ll need to read it twice.

See, you can’t fix the pieces until you see the whole. So here’s the rule for your first read-through:

Read your work. And I mean read.

No modifying. No adjusting. No fixing. No correcting. No changing. No Tweaking. No swapping words, or shifting, or blending, or cutting, or pasting, or spelling, or... or anything!

You may only read. (You can keep a BIN handy for ideas and notes, but not for throwing anything away!)

As you read, feel the overall effect. Remember, you’re transfering ideas from your head to your reader’s head.

You need to see what you’re really transferring!

What’s there? What’s missing? How is it different to what you expected? Is what you thought you were writing what you’ve actually written?

The overall effect is a combination of many things — your initial ideas, your Focus Plan, your ability to stay on track, your writing style, pace, tone, presentation, and so on.

You’ll only get it if you read it, first, all the way through.

When you’re finished — and only when you’re finished — write down your impressions. Your thoughts. Ideas that weren’t clear. Sections that didn’t make sense. What’s missing, and what you thought could be stronger.

On your second read, you can start making some notes.