By ‘new print-off’ I don’t mean necessarily something that’s fully written in my own words. Particularly at the early stages of the process of drafting and redrafting a piece, these documents are likely to be a messy combination of bits of own writing (often in note form and ungrammatical), chunks of copied and pasted texts from my blog, from my files, from other people’s texts, etc.

By the 4th or 5th ‘draft’ I have a good idea of which materials I’ll be using and which discarding, and in what order. So at the early stages content and organisation are in driving seat, and it’s only later that style and argument take over. I find that if I try to sit down and ‘write’ too early, this slows down the whole process of sifting and sorting through masses of notes, web contents and thoughts. Mind-mapping is a good way of connecting these masses before trying to organise them in a linear fashion.

One rule of thumb is that you start each new draft with an outline and with a fresh mind (preferably in the morning) and ready to discard any contents from a previous draft that you no longer need, however interesting they may be in their own right.