Before You Start Writing a First Draft of Anything, Do This

Photo by Jamie Templeton on Unsplash

In the [redacted] number of years that I’ve been writing for public consumption, I’ve published hundreds of thousands of words in hundreds (or thousands?) of blog posts, articles, essays, poems, short stories, a short book, and miscellaneous embarrassing projects I will never tell anyone about, not even on my deathbed. I’ve edited a bunch of them, too.