There was a time when I decided to try the "write the first draft without editing" method. I churned through a 23,000 word novella, never looking back until I was done. It was the most miserable writing experience of my life. I still can't stand looking at that draft, and it's been six years or more! The prose is ridiculously bad. Every last goddamn paragraph has to be rewritten from scratch - it's incredibly discouraging to open that folder. I want to shoot myself when I'm still trying to read page one. If I edit as I go, I wind up with a first draft that reads well. It's something I can be proud of on a paragraph-by-paragraph level. Of course, because I'm a pantser, it needs huge changes - I might have to delete and replace 40% of it, or even more. But looking at the draft doesn't drive me to suicide, so I can still work on it without gagging. I respectfully disagree with @ChickenFreak above. She says editing a paragraph to perfection is a waste of time if that paragraph might not even exist in the final version. I think the crafting of a perfect paragraph is a worthy task in itself. At the very least, it's damn good practice.
Just to clarify, I don't write long things without editing--I wouldn't write a whole novel as an unedited first draft, for example. I said that the "unit" for my writing is phrases, but I think that the next unit up is the 300-or-so-word chunk. I'm not generally concise enough to say anything worthwhile in one paragraph. This is true to the extent that when I read my brain said, "Huh? No. You can't rewrite just one paragraph." Which is of course silly. I can't rewrite just one paragraph. I can rewrite a phrase, and I can rewrite a chunk. Those are the logical units for my brain. That doesn't mean that they're the logical units for anybody else's brain. But for me, in my brain, writing or editing one paragraph is like baking one slice of cake. A slice is a logical unit for consumption, and so is a paragraph, but for me, it's not a logical unit for creation.
What I meant was, I have to rewrite the whole story. It doesn't matter what unit you like to think in. I was talking about everything - the whole damn thing.
Oh totally. So many questions we ask is really in an attempt to find the "only right way" to write when there is none. Sometimes I wanna reply to a thread in all capital letters just screaming: Write it whatever damned way you like, it honestly doesn't matter! Cus really, it doesn't. As long as you're enjoying it, using the device properly so as to be understood, and finishing, who the heck cares?
I have a book like this it's so crammed to the gills ( believe me this monster has gills ) that I can't even attempt to edit it. I tried and gave up. One good thing came out of it. Brevity. I've never allowed my prose to get that far away from me again. ( well, not as much anyway. )
