Creativity doesn't work that way. You'll literally inventing new things. It would be like saying, "let me plan out how I will innovate." Makes no sense.
The advice to "don't edit while you write" usually comes after the advice to "make an outline" before you write. You are supposed to figure out how the pieces fit. Then quickly write it all out. Then edit edit edit.
The general idea is that is easier to edit afterwards than to edit on the fly. Its true for me.
I very rarely know what I'm going to write until I start writing. I don't even outline anything. I just start writing and relentlessly edit as I go.
I do the same thing for 1,000 word blog posts as I do with 400,000+ word course scripts.
If anything editing is more important for the larger pieces of work because in order to cleanly flow to the next lesson or section of a course the prior stuff has to be pretty much in its final form.
A good way to think of creative writing, if you're a technical writer, is to imagine attempting to write a textbook when you don't know the subject at all, and the "demand" from each new paragraph causes you to do the research necessary to acquire the knowledge necessary to write it.
How would you even structure a thing like that, in advance?
How would it ever attain a sensible shape if done a paragraph at a time, when something you learned while doing the research necessary to write paragraph 100 invalidates everything you wrote before it, or causes a complete restructuring of your mental model such that you realize the topic should be presented in an entirely different order? (And then you realize that again, and again, and again...)
A similar thing occurs in investigative journalism. How would you know how to present a story—know what story you're telling, really—before you know all the key facts? In est, before you've completed your investigation? You could certainly write notes about what you might write, but those have little to do with drafting the final story.
I'm not really a big outline person either for either writing or presentations. I almost always have some idea where I'm going though it's not unusual for that to diverge.
Same thing with writing. Yes, you are literally making things up and inventing new things, but that doesn't mean that one is writing freely and not needing to edit along the way. Outlines give framework, and editing gives time to reflect and plan things that might not have been planned in the beginning. I'm not saying that no one works this way - just sits and writes, or does freehand paintings (I do this last one, even with watercolor, and accept a certain failure rate) - but how one works doesn't really reflect on their creativity nor how their creativity works.
For many disciplines, the actual research involves field work, performing experiments, etc., and the thesis is primarily about reporting on that process and connecting it to the pre-existing body of research. For other disciplines (for example, philosophy), the text of the thesis is all there is to the research. Maybe the later is more like creative writing and the former more like technical writing??
(My uncle did a PhD in creative writing, his PhD thesis was a novel.)
Not that I know how the mind of a great author works, but it seems that it would be difficult to write a great story without having some solid idea of what the final product should look like before you start. Like creating a product, maybe they pivot a lot after realizing that something doesn't work well (Margaret Atwood apparently did that for a book once, completely started from scratch after realizing that she had chosen the wrong point of view for the protagonist). BUT it's difficult for me to imagine they don't actually have a good solid idea of the story they want to tell before they start writing. If not book by book, then at least chapter by chapter. But hey, I'm not an author, maybe their minds really do work differently. It's possible.
I guess my overall point is that I don't think having a solid idea about what the final product should look like is the reason why authors have the "never edit while drafting" because I think they also pre-structure their ideas, and diverge on "editing while drafting" for some other reason. But of course I have no data or evidence to back this idea up.
It's not really real editing though. You don't catch everything because you're still in the writing mindset. Plenty of times i've just gone back and completely re-written whole sections during editing. I won't usually do that while writing something. Editing and writing are two somewhat different skillsets.
Editing requires a detachment you can't quite get while something's fresh. You need a bit of time away from something before you can go and do a full real edit. It helps you look at things more objectively. Re-reading a first draft of something I wrote after usually only a couple of hours kinda makes me cringe sometimes even with some inline editing while writing.
I look at it like coding. I'll write a section, test it, fix simple mistakes, keep going until I hit a bigger complete milestone, then go back and fix all the real mistakes while I'm debugging.
ETA: Sometimes I wish the edit windows were longer on hn. There's been a few comments on here I wish I could go back and change after i've had time to.look at them more objectively. Not always downvoted ones.
For this reason I trained myself to make the first draft the final draft. Now with computers this is no longer relevant as I'm not hand writing multiple drafts on paper.
There are other factors, but I think this one is major for a lot of people.
A book people might find interesting is Joe Moran’s "First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life". He examines writing from the ground up. I found it a really wonderful book to read. Each sentence in it is great.
* Conventional development = writing, then editing
* Test-driven development = writing and editing simultaneously
The preferences are endless and neither removes the most difficult part which is the conceptual architecture.
Personally, I like to splatter a whole bunch of ideas down first and then later go back and commit.
When writing my first draft, I often have very little idea how the whole thing is going to turn out. I simply don't have the big picture yet. If I spend time honing my sentences then, most of the editing time is wasted because I'd later rewrite them anyways.
For shorter academic and work pieces (and back when I blogged) I’ve done this as well, but I do an outline for longer papers first, and then edit as I go. Of course I wasn’t anywhere near nickjj’s level of output.
[1] https://www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/science-fiction-and-fanta...
I also start writing in a fairly basic text editor, not a word processor, which makes it easy for me to reorder that point form outline with my keyboard and get the flow of the major points down before I start the actual writing.
The text editor also prevents me from spending too much time on that 5% of improvements until the very end. But, I do edit major grammar issues and color as I go since, like you, I feel like I can't move on until it sounds right, and the way I say something often shapes what comes next. Still, having an outline helps me get into those weeds a little bit in the moment and not lose sight on where I'm going next.
I can't stress the outline enough. I wish I did it in the early days, but I wasn't able to "see" the whole story from the beginning back then. Now, I find it is the thing that helps me see what is important to the topic. Sometimes I feel like I need to talk about a point up front but after roughing it out I realize it's actually more interesting and easier to understand if I hold it back until the end. Conversely, there are some really interesting things that can't be explained until the end but I can tease them up front to build excitement and then explain them after the foundation is laid.
Hamming agrees in his famous speech (see the Q&A section on this page - https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html) that 50% of the time is just spent writing/presenting research.
The words, style and delivery of my intentions through a pen/pencil/crayon differ from my spoken word and typed thoughts.
Trite "avoid ..." theses are often ... trite.
I've tried the 'never edit your first pass' approach before, and I found that my ideas flowed like sandpaper instead of silk. It was awful. I simply do not think in that manner.
I basically write a couple of sentences or paragraphs, stop, review, reword things if needed, change things around and move on. Then at the very end I'll give it all a final reordering / fixing until I'm happy with it.
I feel like I can't progress to the next chunk of an article until the prior section is 95% edited because what I write next depends on what was previously written.
Does anyone else work like that?