From messy draft to magic in one question

Art of Writing, January 27, 2026

Every now and then, we stumble across on little tidbit that shines a light on something we felt in our gut but lacked words for. A lightbulb moment. I had one of those the other day about writing, and the process that helps me shape my messy drafts.

It all started with a post unrelated to writing. It was by a designer who does corporate branding on social media. The title made it very clear it was about corporate branding. Normally, I’d scroll on by but it was re-stacked by an artist I enjoy, so I clicked.

The designer said when she takes on a new client, she looks at all the stuff they have on social media and tells everyone the same thing. There’s too much happening here and you’re not sending a clear message to the consumer. It pinged my brain in a strange way. Because I knew there was something about writing hidden in that.

When I write an essay, here’s what I do. I see something or think of something that says there’s a story here. Then I open the blank page and start typing.

Hemingway said all first drafts are shit and he may as well have been looking over my shoulder when he said that. My first drafts are crap. I know they’re supposed to be, because the first draft is just a writer pouring sand in a box. Building the sand castle comes later. Dumping the sand is easy, but building the castle is the hard part.

When I read that branding post, her

Here’s what came to mind…

One day I read a post talking about how hard aging is because, y’know, joints are stiff, knee hurts, not as limber, and it ended up just being a litany of health complaints. It frustrated me because everyone says that, doctors included. Oh, you’re just aging and maybe in some cases it’s true but in most cases it’s the result of being sedentary. Hell, there are eighty year old mountain climbers, runners, pole dancers, gymnasts.

Not that I’m eighty, but when doctors start blaming “aging” for everything at forty and fifty, it frustrates me because it’s cliché and it’s not the entire truth.

Anyway—I opened a blank page and started banging out my thoughts on aging.

When I dumped all the sand in the box, it was a damn mess but they always are so I did what I always do. Closed the page to let it rest so I could come back and clean it up later. But every time I tried to edit, I still didn’t like it. It didn’t feel cohesive, so I rearranged that piece over and over trying to edit the mess, but a week later, it still wasn’t published. Ten days later, it was still sitting there in draft.

Fact was, I didn’t know how to fix it.

I felt like I was rambling, you know? And that’s the biggest sin of writing.

William Zinsser wrote one of the bestselling books on writing and one thing he hammered home is that rambling is the curse of good writing. Noah Lukeman says the same. For decades he was a New York literary agent with some kind of magic because he’d pick new writers and they’d almost always go bestseller or win literary awards. In his book, he says if he sees rambling in the first five pages, it’s a no.

But nothing in the draft felt like rambling. It felt relevant, but disjointed. You know? Like a bunch of bones in a pile with no joints to make them move cohesively.

Finally, in utter frustration, I sat back in my chair and asked myself a question — what the hell am I trying to say here? In one sentence.

And the truth was, I could not answer that in one clear sentence.

Because that draft? It was filled with circular thoughts. All circling around aging, but with no clear unifying message. I kept staring at it, thinking what the hell am I trying to say here? And then I got it. Summed up the whole piece in one sentence.

Once I did that, I knew exactly how to edit it.

That piece because one of my top three on Medium, with almost 200K views. It was my first really big homerun over there.

Once that piece took off, I thought the sentence itself was the magic. So I’d ask myself that question before I started writing. I’d sit in front of a blank page with a topic or idea in mind and ask myself — what the hell am I trying to say here.

It utterly failed. I wrote too tight. Like I was looking through a macro lens instead of a wide angle. And macro is good on the paragraph level, but wide angle is where the magic of an essay happens. It’s where people relate and connect.

When you write an essay from a macro view, it become like a play by play of an event instead of a wider look at ourselves and humanity.

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When my kiddo was little, we went to Disneyland. We stayed until it got dark. I don’t know if this still happens, but once it was dark out, the trees lit up with tiny fairy lights. It’s one thing to see fairy lights on a Christmas tree or one isolated place, but to be surrounded by them as far as the eye can see was just absolutely magical.

To turn in a circle and see lights twinkling everywhere was entirely different so I bent down and put my arm around kiddo and said look!— this is how our minds work.

And it really is because when the brain is active, particularly during learning or performing cognitive tasks, our neurons light up just like fairy lights.

This morning I ran across a note that said the problem isn’t that people use AI to string words together, it’s that too many people use AI to think for them.

I don’t use AI to do my writing or thinking, but there’s a lot of truth in that.

But that applies to people who are not using AI, too. Just because we can use the power of cognitive connections doesn’t mean we do.

We limit ourselves as writers when we don’t give our minds the freedom to light up as far as the mind can see and remember. You know? And the fastest way to limit ourselves is to box our thoughts too early in the writing process.

The other day, I saw a video clip of an old woman screaming at ICE agents. She was so angry, it was like she had no fear. Especially when one of them smirked at her. Wow, did that ever set her off. I watched that video several times.

Then I opened a blank page and started letting my thoughts spill out. Omg, everything from the Chernobyl Babas to Jane Fonda to the time someone tried to steal my mom’s purse. I just let it all spill.

Let the fairy lights of my brain do their magic. Making connections. Dump everything that old woman made me think of and remember. When it was all spilled out, I did what I always do. Closed it and walked away.

And asked myself the question. What the hell am I trying to say here?

I had no idea. Not at first. I didn’t know why my brain made all those connections. No idea why all those things came to me. But I knew there was a reason. Something my mind was seeing subconsciously that I wasn’t seeing on a conscious level.

The answer popped into my head while I was writing copy for a client because of course, that’s how the mind works. Give it a question and go do something else. The human mind makes amazing connections if we don’t get in our own way.

I think that’s one of the biggest struggles of essay writing. We get in our own way. Try to mold and shape our thoughts like we’re the leader, not the follower.

Know what the connection was? Old women are more powerful than they realize.

That’s how all the thoughts were connected. That’s the sentence.

Because we live in this world where a lot of women feel invisible. Feel like the world doesn’t care about them anymore because they aren’t young. And once I knew the connection, I knew how to edit that into a killer essay.

I could have just written about the old lady. And I could have made it a good read. But why? I could just share the link. I didn’t want a play by play and my mind saw all the connections when I allowed it to. By dumping everything that came to mind into the draft. But the magic didn’t happen until I saw what connected all the thoughts.

It’s not a method that works for fiction or poetry, but for essays, it’s magic. When some idea inspires me, go wide. Dump everything that comes to mind. Then look at the mess of disjointed thoughts and ask —what the hell am I trying to say?

Just don’t ask that question before writing the draft. It will limit you. You won’t have enough sand to make a sand castle, you’ll just write a good play by play. But if you let your mind dump everything, all that’s left is seeing what it’s trying to tell you.

Love to know what you think…

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