My Process of Writing - by Atharva Nihalani

This isn’t what I’d planned to write today! My original piece, however, felt a little too acerbic to post on New Year’s Eve. I’ll save that for another day. —— There are three drafts. Of them, the first is my favorite. I turn my screen off, then, in the darkness, take a big, steaming dump. Anything that comes into my mind, for the next thirty-odd minutes, comes right back out on screen. It’s usually a few pages long, and is incredibly fragmented. Remove all paragraph breaks, and you halve the length. Draft one, is written entirely for myself. This means I’ve got all sorts of funky features. I’ve got footnotes, typos, italics for a stream-of-consciousness-pondering about my stream-of-consciousness-writing, far too many en-dashes, curly braces signposting the previous features for my future self, and a menagerie of similar beasts. And this would be totally fine, if I were, say, journaling! However, I’m not just writing for myself, dear reader, I also write for you. Which means, I have to

This isn’t what I’d planned to write today! My original piece, however, felt a little too acerbic to post on New Year’s Eve. I’ll save that for another day. —— There are three drafts. Of them, the first is my favorite. I turn my screen off, then, in the darkness, take a big, steaming dump. Anything that comes into my mind, for the next thirty-odd minutes, comes right back out on screen. It’s usually a few pages long, and is incredibly fragmented. Remove all paragraph breaks, and you halve the length. Draft one, is written entirely for myself. This means I’ve got all sorts of funky features. I’