Lia Declan's Musings

Perfection is the enemy of momentum

Against Extensive Self-Editing During the First Draft

The internet is full of advice for writers, and most of it sounds helpful until you try to actually use it. The one that does the most harm, at least in my experience, is the idea that you should “edit as you go.” That’s the advice you’ll find on forums, in writing groups, and in countless YouTube videos. Write slow, fix as you move, polish until it gleams. Don’t move to the next page until the current one shines.

The problem is, this method doesn’t produce better writing. It produces stalled writing. It trains you to confuse polish for progress. You end up believing you’re working on the story when you’re really just fussing over a paragraph. The truth is simple: you can’t edit a story that doesn’t exist yet.

The first draft is an act of creation, not refinement. It’s about getting the full shape of the story onto the page… the beginning, the middle, and the end. It’s about finding the voice, testing the rhythm, building the bones. When you stop to perfect every line, you break that forward motion. You take your foot off the gas to check the tread on a tire that’s still spinning. You turn the living act of storytelling into a performance for no one in particular.

I’ve fallen for it before. We all have. It’s seductive, that sense of control. You tell yourself you’re being professional, careful, or precise. You believe you’re making art. But really, you’re cleaning the house before the walls are up. You’re trying to decide on wallpaper before the roof has been built. And by the time the first ten pages are done, the story beneath them has gone cold.

The Myth of Craft as Control

Most writing advice that sounds professional is really advice about control. We’re told that good writers control every word, every beat, every breath of the prose. We’re told that mastery means eliminating imperfection. What we’re not told is that this obsession with control replaces discovery with performance.

I’ve taught workshops, sat in critique groups, and read essays that make craft sound like surgery. Clean lines. Sharp instruments. Remove everything unnecessary. But if you cut too deep, you don’t end up with a cleaner body. You end up with a corpse.

Craft is not about control. It’s about fidelity to voice, to emotion, to the rhythm of a mind trying to tell a truth. When you edit as you go, you start writing in the voice of the editor, not the narrator. The sentences lose their pulse. They flatten into grammatic correctness. The story stops sounding human and starts sounding like an imitation of literature.

You can always tell when a book was written that way. The prose shines, but nothing inside it breathes. You can’t hear the writer thinking or reaching. You can’t hear the stumble that tells you this is a person trying to make sense of something. It’s all perfect grammar and balanced clauses, and none of it feels alive.

The Living Draft and the Dead Page

I think about this a lot when I look back at my short stories and novels. Take, for example, Some Days I Wear My Name. That story was written fast. I didn’t edit while drafting it, and I barely even looked back. I wrote in first person because I needed to feel the rhythm of a living voice… someone raw, immediate, contradictory, human. If I had paused to edit every paragraph, I would’ve lost that pulse. The character would’ve started sounding like a composition exercise instead of a person.

In fact, by the time I finished the first half, I had one long 1,300 word paragraph with some of the worst sentence structure I have ever used. Punctuation was fragmented and at times, non-existent.

In that story, based on my own experiences, I let the narrator’s thoughts run messy. I let her contradict herself. I let her have rhythm that sometimes broke the expected beat. I knew I could fix the grammar later, but I couldn’t reconstruct the human pattern of thought once it was gone. That pattern, those hesitations, the repetitions, the interruptions; that’s what gives voice its humanity.

Now, compare that to The Weather House. That one I drafted slower. I thought I was being careful, but I was really being cautious. I polished as I went, thinking it would make revision easier later. What it did was sterilize the voice. I started writing not from instinct but from distance. Every time I paused to edit, I lost track of the emotional through-line, sometimes even forgetting what I wanted to write in the first place. I could feel it happening, that deadness creeping in. The prose started to sound like someone explaining a story rather than living one.

I went back later and had to undo all that polish. I had to reintroduce the human stumbles, the irregularities, the living tone. It was like sanding a floor too many times and realizing the wood’s gone thin. You can’t polish humanity into prose. You can only preserve it by letting it exist in the first place. That piece, by the way, never made it to publication. I was so disgusted by it, that it now sits abandoned in my “in progress” folder.

Momentum, Emotion, and Continuity

Writing a first draft is a sacred act. It’s about rhythm and movement. You can’t keep stopping the current to inspect every ripple. The story has to move, and so do you. Every time you pause to fix a line, you break the emotional continuity that ties one scene to the next.

When I’m drafting, I don’t want perfect sentences. I want the emotional thread to remain unbroken. I can clean a sentence later, fix typos, and punctuation. I can’t recreate the moment I first felt it. That’s the part that matters, that connection between the thought, the body, and the words on the page.

The continuity isn’t just emotional. It’s tonal. If you write the first chapter in January and spend two months polishing it before moving on, by the time you reach chapter two, you’re no longer the same person. The mood, the world, the character’s rhythm… they all evolve. You end up with a disjointed book written by multiple versions of yourself, each chasing a different perfection.

My novel, The Kin, was written over the course of seventeen years. In the first week of writing that story, I had over 50,000 words, very little punctuation, and maybe three paragraphs. Ok, there were more than three paragraphs, but it was definitely difficult to tell where one ended and the next began.

There were no chapter breaks, no page numbers, and more typos and spelling errors than I care to admit. The second half, if you look closely, you will see a definite difference in my writing style.

The Inner Editor as the Inner Censor

Every writer has an inner editor, and that voice can be useful, but only at the right time. During a first draft, it’s the enemy. It’s not really an editor at that point. It’s a censor. It’s the part of you that hates being imperfect. The part that fears being found out.

When you stop mid-sentence to fix a phrase, what you’re really doing is protecting yourself from vulnerability. You’re editing the evidence that you don’t yet have full control over. You’re erasing the proof that you were ever uncertain, or angry, or lost. But those are the moments that give writing its truth.

I’ve watched writers edit the life out of a paragraph until there’s nothing left but correctness. They call it refinement, but it’s really concealment. It’s a way of avoiding the risk of being seen. The story becomes an armor plate instead of a window. And once it’s covered, you can’t get back inside.

When I write a first draft, I make myself leave those rough places untouched. I let the contradictions stand. I let the awkward phrasing breathe. It’s the only way to preserve the record of having been there while the story was still being found. Later, when I revise, I can clean it. But in the beginning, I need it to stay human.

The False Economy of Constant Refinement

There’s also a practical argument to be made here. Editing as you go feels productive, but it’s not. It’s the illusion of work. You can spend three weeks perfecting a single chapter, believing you’re moving forward, but you’re really standing still. That polish is temporary anyway, you’ll rewrite it later when you know what the story actually is.

The first draft is about discovery. You don’t know what the story means until you’ve written it. You don’t know what the first chapter needs until you’ve written the last. Early editing is like trying to frost a cake you haven’t baked yet. You’re arranging one flower in an otherwise empty vase.

I see this all the time in early-career writers. They polish the opening pages for months, terrified of moving forward until those pages are “perfect.” What they end up with is ten perfect pages and no book. They’ve built the facade of a house and never poured the foundation. The time they spent refining the first act has to be undone later anyway, because the story that emerges will demand changes. So all that polish is wasted. The real work hasn’t even started.

The fastest way to write a bad book is to mistake prettiness for purpose. The only cure is to keep going.

Counterpoint: The Argument for Slow Drafting

Now, I know there are writers who swear by slow drafting. They’ll tell you that careful, line-by-line perfection saves time later. And maybe for them, it does. Some writers are architects by temperament. They can’t move on until the structure feels exact. But that’s rare, and even then, it works because they already know the shape of their story. My characters don’t usually tell me their ending before I write their beginning.

The problem isn’t that some writers edit as they go. The problem is that this method has been sold as universal truth. Every writer is different. What works for one will strangle another. But because the internet rewards neat, repeatable advice, we keep hearing the same line: write slow, edit early, polish everything.

It’s nonsense. The first draft is the place to get messy. The page should be full of contradictions, placeholders, half-thoughts, sentences you’ll delete later. That’s what a draft is for. If you demand finish-line quality before you’ve even mapped the race, you’ll never finish anything. The goal is completion, not polish. You can’t revise a void.

The Moral Argument: Letting the Voice Live

This is where I want to land: over-editing doesn’t just stall you. It dehumanizes your prose. The human voice, when it’s alive, carries rough edges. It meanders. It remembers and forgets in the same breath. It says the wrong thing, then corrects itself. That’s what makes it believable. That’s what makes it intimate.

When you over-polish, you strip all that away. You replace it with the cold perfection of craft without heart. The result is prose that sounds right but feels wrong. It’s a kind of literary taxidermy. The project looks whole, but it doesn’t breathe.

Readers can feel the difference, even if they can’t name it directly. They know when a voice has been flattened into forced correctness. They know when a paragraph has been sanded until it no longer bears fingerprints. When a breath is in the wrong place, because a comma is in the most correct grammatical position, instead of where the narrator would put it if they were speaking. What they’re responding to isn’t style. It’s the absence of a person behind the words.

Every story begins with a voice trying to make itself heard. The first draft is that voice at its most honest. It’s unfiltered. It’s full of rhythm and accident and impulse. When you silence it too soon, you lose the only thing that made it worth writing in the first place.

I think about this whenever I’m tempted to polish during a first pass. I remind myself that perfection is not the goal; connection is. The sentences can be ugly. The phrasing can wobble. As long as the heartbeat’s still there, I can fix everything else later. The human part must come first. The editing comes after.

Finish the Thing

So if you take anything from this, let it be this: finish the thing. Don’t stop to polish. Don’t stop to question. Get the whole shape of it down before you let the editor touch a single line, and don’t accept software recommendations for punctuation as an absolute. The first draft isn’t about beauty. It’s about honesty.

When you edit as you go, you train yourself to value neatness over truth. You start writing for the imaginary critic instead of the living reader. You stop listening to the story and start listening to your own anxiety. That’s not writing. That’s self-erasure disguised as craft.

The art of writing is to stay human on the page. To let the flaws show. To risk being seen before you’re ready. The draft is the only place where you can do that without consequence. It’s private. It’s alive. It’s yours.

Later, yes, you’ll revise. You’ll sand the corners and polish the phrasing. You’ll fix what needs fixing. But you can’t revise what doesn’t exist. You can’t polish what you never finished building.

Finish the story, then make it shiny. But don’t confuse one for the other. The story can’t breathe if you don’t give it life first.

What are your thoughts?