Writing Hack: Retyping a Draft from Scratch

Another trick I learned from Sasha Chapin

I often find myself in this situation: I’ve got a draft (or a chunk of one), but something about it just doesn’t feel right. Something is off — but I can’t immediately put my finger on exactly what. Sometimes the piece is riddled with tiny rough edges. Sometimes it lacks life. And sometimes the flow stalls after a couple of freshly written paragraphs — they suddenly lose their connection to the rest of the text.

Whenever that happens, I use a trick that I learned from

Sasha Chapin

when he offhandedly mentioned it at the end of one of his writing workshops. I retype the whole draft with changes — looking at the previous version as I go. Some sentences stay exactly the same. Others get light tweaks in wording. Along the way the flow usually tightens up on its own and the text becomes more “fluid.” And in some places, the draft changes a lot — I add new units of meaning, sentences and paragraphs, comparisons and metaphors, personal stories.

It is crucial to never copy-paste even the perfectly good sentences — retype them from scratch while peeking at the original. At first glance this seems like needless extra work. But the aim is to enter back into the familiar rhythm of writing from personal experience and to make sure the text matches it (see my post “Writing Hack: Write It Just Like That”). This is akin to an icebreaker facing thick ice: the ship backs up several hull lengths, gains speed in the already cleared channel, and slams full-tilt into the stubborn slab. It’s the same with text — backtrack, re-enter the groove of what’s already written, and break through the “frozen” sections.

Of course, sometimes it’s immediately obvious what's wrong with the writing: here a metaphor is missing, there a story is needed, this sentence should be split in two. In such cases, I edit without any retyping. This hack isn't for these cases. It’s for the “rough-and-ragged draft syndrome,” when it’s not immediately obvious what to fix.

Naturally, the hack isn’t a cure-all. Not every piece gets better by being retyped. Sometimes a draft just needs to be thrown out. For instance, this post emerged as part of a draft about the difficulties of translating my essay about a lost backpack into English. Then I realised that the draft didn’t excite me at all, and my meta-pieces rarely resonate with readers — if the draft doesn’t fire me up and readers likely don’t need it, there's not a single reason to continue working on it. But the paragraphs about this writing hack felt worth salvaging as a standalone post.

That’s how the idea for this piece was born. And then I applied the retyping hack three times. First, I retyped the paragraphs making them into a standalone second-person advice post. Then I thought, “Wait, I’m describing my personal experience — why write in second person?” — and retyped it in first person. And just before publishing, I retyped it a third time to smooth out the remaining bumps.

I'm publishing this piece while it still feels right — so I won't have to retype it a fourth time.