Just do it

I find that in writing I always try to make everything sound perfect on the first try. I will constantly erase and retype sentences or words that I don't immediately like, and I will spend half of my time thinking about how exactly I want to say what I am thinking. The big problem with this is that there seems to be quite a difference between how things sound in my mind, and how I want them to sound on paper, often making it quite a different process. The process then ends up taking me extra long because I cannot seem to translate my thoughts in my head very well, and in trying to do so I often just get frustrated and my mind starts to wander. I think a big part about this is that I hate reading over my own work. I find it so boring to go over something that I just wrote, and so i try to get everything sounding perfect on the first time through. The problem is that this doesn't usually work that well.

Lately I have been trying to look more into the difference between speaking and writing. When listening to people speak, they sound much different than they do on paper. Speaking seems much more free, no one is going to call you out on a verbal run on sentence, or tell you that there were too many commas in your speech. The whole idea seems much less about being correct and more about communicating.

So what can I do about it? I have been thinking a lot more on just writing out exactly what is on my mind, just how it comes out, and then editing it after. That way I get everything on the page while its right there, I don't have to pass it around in my head trying to find the best way to say it but I just say it. When everything is on the page, then I can edit it to sound how I want it to. To me this seems like a much better and more consistent way to do things. Splitting things into two stages of writing and editing makes it so that while i am writing I am not concerned with editing, and while I am editing I can see the whole picture at once. The only problem then is finding the patience to read over my work critically.