All In One Sitting

I've always tried to do as much writing as I can in one sitting, even when it forced me to keep strange hours. I do it because I want to keep the feel of my writing.

In my experiences, when I get into a groove of writing, I sound a particular way. I have a rhythm, a flow, a sound. I'm in a groove because I have a steady, consistent pace. Once I stop writing, I'm out of the groove and I lose my train of thought. Sometimes I can slip back into it, but it's not a guarantee. If I wait too long (whether that be an hour or a day), I may never sound exactly like I did when I first started.

When I finish a draft and go back to it, I can always find exactly where I took a break and came back to it because it sounds different. Now, I know that longer or more complicated pieces will take several sittings to create no matter what. That's why we go through several drafts when we write something. But even when I write a new draft, I still try to write as much as I can in one sitting. It always makes life easier.

Eventually, though, there reaches a point where either you simply can't write something in one sitting or you need to make minor tweaks to your work to smooth or clean it up. When you are at that point, then you should make sure to read your work in one sitting (or as few as possible) to check for any bad seams in your work.

The point of this whole thing is that you want a smooth, polished work when you go to publish. Writing it all in one setting is a technique I use to try to maintain a polish in earlier drafts. If you can maintain a style from sitting to sitting, or if you can add all of your polish at the final phase of editing, then do that and save yourself the horrifically late hours of trying to finish a draft.