How to write a rough draft

You've got to write web content, or copy for a brochure or a press release, or even an important email. You're staring at a blank screen, and you don't know where to begin. Or, you keep rewriting the first sentence over and over and over again.

Stop. Think rough. Think rough draft.

It's impossible to edit something that isn't yet on the page, and that's what most new writers do. They self edit before they even get the words written into the Word document. A great way to avoid this is to think of the first draft of anything as a rough draft.

A rough draft means just that -- the writing will be rough and disorganized. We're all taught at a young age not to misspell, not to write poorly that we end up becoming terrified about beginning any new piece of writing.

With a rough draft, write all the ideas you have down quickly. Don't edit yourself. Don't worry about chronology. Don't even worry about spelling, grammar or punctuation. Just do a mind dump onto the page. Here's an example for a press release:

Literary executive is for businesspeople who want to improve their writing. Staff and executives. For executives, I help them write books. Self-help business books, for example. For staff, I am setting up downloadable lesson plans for pay, so anyone anywhere in the world can improve their writing in English. Writing well in English is important to winning in the global marketplace. S.K. (need to ask him if I can interview him for the press release), the CFO of a major financial firm, came to me to improve his writing. Not business writing; S wanted to learn fiction. Short story writing. One short story collection later, how does S feel about the effect on his writing performance at work? Quote here from S on how the skills of writing translate to on-the-job performance.

I don't worry if it's chronological. In fact, I hadn't even thought about S.K. until after I'd started writing.  Now I know he'll be the lead of the press release; a good human interest lead is a great way to capture an editor's attention. I know because I used to be an editor.

That's why it's important to just brain dump. In the dump comes ideas you wouldn't have come up with if you'd just "thought it through". The writing process itself opens creative doors.

Now comes the fun part: writing the lead in solid visceral detail so it grabs the reader, putting the other ideas in decreasing order of importance, fleshing out the information, finding a solid feature article ending. And that's STILL the rough draft phase. The final phase is for editing and revising, going through the article with a fine toothed comb, upping the ante on the verb usage, and clarifying any information that is unclear.

But the final phase is the future, for now, just dump the thoughts on the page. Don't self edit, just purge. You can't revise something that is still in your head. Get it on the page so that you have something to work with!