I find it fascinating to see how much deleting and rewriting the author did on the first two sentences of his Atlantic article. You can see the idea getting rewritten in many ways.
Is this a typical way to write a magazine article? I wouldn't have expected so much time revising the opening sentences before getting the rest of the article in place. (But there's probably a lot of variation between writers.)
I've written a fair number of magazine articles, and also a lot of white papers and other documents.
For me, I usually spend a day or two just thinking about it in my head. Going over what would be a logical thought flow and things like that. When I sit down to actually write, I tend to have very few revisions. My first draft is much closer to the typical persons 5th draft (I think), but that's because I've been revising and editing in my head first.
You remind me of a Japanese artist that envisioned the movements he was going to make to make his painting for a long time and then when he finally started moving the painting was done extremely fast. I forgot his name but I thought it was fascinating. I agonize over the first line of whatever I have to write for a long time but once that first line is done the rest goes easy.
I found that when I first started writing regularly I would spend a lot of time doing constant editing similar to the example shown in the linked article. This would become distracting and time consuming, then I'd forget other things I had wanted to say. So I found it better, for me, to just kind of write things in my head first and then sit down and write -almost more transcribing vs. "writing".
Thanks, thats really helpful for me. I am just starting to learn to write blog articles for my business and I certainly do a LOT of editing. Glad to see someone progress to where I want to be at... one day
I agree, it's really cool to see. I always write like this for the opening paragraph when I'm trying to get the hook right. It sets the tone for the rest of the article, which tends to flow a lot more freely.
Ahh I'm now hyper aware of it and realise I've chopped and changed that ^^ first paragraph a ton of times.
It's either that way, or the old trick / saying "Wait until you've finished your piece before writing the introduction paragraph, because how else are you going to know what the whole thing is about?" Chicken or egg, YMMV.
Is this a typical way to write a magazine article? I wouldn't have expected so much time revising the opening sentences before getting the rest of the article in place. (But there's probably a lot of variation between writers.)