Many authors advice new writers to vomit content onto a page and then revise it afterwards. This, they say, will allow them to yield the content of their work, and establish its form later. The idea is that the human brain cannot focus on form and content at the same time. But as I see it, form always precedes content, for as we are unable to think without using language, so too are we unable to generate content without putting it in form. When we author a sentence in a rough draft, our mind is first on the form of the sentence, and then the content. If we wish to speak of the cause and effect relationship between two things, we first have in mind either the cause or the relationship, then we write the independent clause, attaching the subordinate, “because” clause to it. The very fact that we do this proves that form precedes content. Therefore, our brains do not yield content by itself, without any form to hold it. But there is a difference between natural form and refined form, two terms which I think myself to have coined. Our brains are able to generate certain forms most easily, which are unpolished and unsuitable for publication. But this is not pure content; it is unrefined form. Once we have this unrefined form, we can restructure it into a more refined form. This is the essence, I believe, behind the concept of a rough draft and a final draft. This may be obvious, but whenever I have heard someone talk about rough drafts and final drafts, they always talk about content vs form, rather than natural form vs refined form. I think we should view things differently, which will allow people to edit as they write without feeling as though they are doing things wrong.
Well, I don’t see a question here (this area is for questions concerning one’s WIP), but I’ll bite. I think it’s profoundly important to take into account the context of any advice given to anyone with respect to writing. Without the context that gave rise to the advice, we do not know why the advice was given nor what malady it was meant to rectify. The advice of “get it on the page and finesse it after” is advice given to a very specific end recipient, deployed toward those who express a difficulty getting anything on the page, for the person who can’t write the first word until they know it's part of a perfect intro sentence that’s part of a perfect intro paragraph. Those of us who have no trouble pouring out the words are not the intended recipient for that particular aphorism. People regularly stall out before they ever even hit the track. The page is blank; the pen remains virgin. The advice we give to these people is not going to be the same as we give to someone who doesn’t know how to conclude a never-ending 50k monster chapter because they don't really understand the dynamics of "chapter" as a delimiting concept, or the person who lost track of the ancillary characters and keeps pulling new ones out of their keister, or the person who’s simply given up on trying to understand punctuation, characterization, pace, metaphor, etc. etc. etc. There is no one size fits all advice, neither the one you are trying to dismantle, nor the one you would erect in its place. It may be advice that works well for you because it fits your situation, but situations are as varied as those who have them.
I think you're right on with your division of natural and refined form, but I think this is basically exactly what people MEAN when they say get it down first and refine later. I've come to realize that generally people have worked their way to their ideas gradually through trial and error, and then when answering a question in here about some aspect of it, they give a really boiled-down version, and most won't bother to explain in such a way as to walk others through the process they took mnonths or years to go throiugh. They'll just throw it out in a couple of words, like "people are all different, so you can't say men and women have certain characteristics" (for example). What they really mean is much more complex than what they said, and has a lot of nuance and depth they aren't bothering to explain. If you pry hard enough or get exasperated enough, sometimes one of them will take pity and write up something explaining a little better (usually just a little though) or somebody else, who has been on the board for a long time and seen this happen many times, will bother to explain what they're really trying to say. Moose did this the other day on a real humdinger of a perennial thread and I suddenly understood that while I thought we were all arguing totally different points, it turns out when you understand them, they're all essentially saying the same thing in very different ways, each arguing against their own particular bugaboo.
The thing about “vomiting content” is that you do have to remember to go back and clean it up. That’s something David Weber failed to do in his later books.
