In Untangling Your Thoughts As You Write, I outlined a way to get started that leans into divergent thinking in the early stages of writing about your research. In it I said

Yes, the published version will need a clear central point. Those threads will need to be untangled and organized in a way that other people can follow.

The first draft does not!

That post got you started. You played. You made a few decisions. You narrowed down some possibilities for an output, even if you don’t know all the details.

This is where some of the advice other people give can be useful to you.

You might not be able to start that way, but now you have chosen your yarn and swatched a couple of stitch patterns, you can start knitting. I may have mentioned that I once started a sweater without knowing what the cuffs and bottom band would look like. You can write an article that way, too.

Like knitting, writing can be ripped out and redone if it really doesn’t work out. Or, you can rip back a section and redo it. It’s frustrating, but it isn’t fatal.

A guide for this phase

I love Pat Thomson’s concept of “tiny text” as a way to clarify the contribution your article is making.

The beauty of tiny texts is that they force you to make decisions.

I have compared writing abstracts to making maple syrup. The thinking involved is real work. It takes time. It makes you tired.

What you end up with is a guide for writing your article. Or writing a piece of an article. Like a knitting pattern.

The key thing is you have clarified the specific contribution you want to make with this specific piece.

Pat also has a post about how she uses the Tiny Text to make a plan. My caveat to that is that you don’t have to plan the whole thing to get started. 

I started that sweater I’ve mentioned with a provisional cast on. It’s a way of getting started that allows you to pick up live stitches to add something below where you started, like the hemband of a sweater.

Reminder: You do not need to write your article in the order readers will read it in!

Start with the evidence.

One thing I’ve discovered in many years of supporting academic writers, is that starting with the introduction and literature review can get you in a very different tangled mess. It can trigger imposter feelings. You start worrying about whether your readers will agree with you, or whether it will even get past initial peer review.

You need to build your own confidence in your argument first.

Not only that, if you are autistic or have ADHD (self-diagnosis & suspicion count), you are strongly motivated by *interest*. And let’s face it, the most interesting part of this process for you is the research. Not what other people said. What you’ve figured out.

So start there.

You don’t have to write sentences.

Here’s another thing we know about ADHD: novelty is important. What that means in practice is that it’s hard to work on things that feel like they are finished.

If you find yourself going off in new directions every time you try to revise, this is the root of the problem.

You might also find it hard to see different ways to write the sentences and paragraphs once you already have sentences and paragraphs. My adult kid compares it to the difference between playing scrabble and doing anagrams. They are really good at Scrabble, but if you give them a group of letters already arranged into a word, figuring out what other word you could arrange those letters in feels almost impossible.

The solution: draft in bullet points.

Seriously, some people will think you are very very weird indeed. But I have a client who drafted an entire book this way.

And if Raul Pacheco-Vega says that a good use of 15-minute writing sessions is “filling up paragraphs”, then I strongly suspect he drafts this way too.

However: Don’t be filling those up now!! That’s a later stage of your process. Your first article draft is going to be that detailed paragraph level outline.

You can write on paper.

Another way to deal with the novelty issue. If it’s hand written in a notebook, it is obviously not finished.

One of my clients works this way. They are a literary scholar writing a book that is organized such that each main chapter focuses on one author and one book by that author. Their drafting process for each chapter was to focus on the close reading of the novel for the first draft and to do that by hand in a notebook.

This on paper part produced a “too long” draft, which might be more like what I was talking about in ‘Untangling your thoughts as you write‘. The next step was to transcribe it into a digital document.

Only it wasn’t really transcription, because further decisions were made at this stage. Decisions like selecting one scene to make a point instead of 3. Or reordering the narrative to flow better.

Outlining as an intermediate phase

Whether or not you do it in a notebook, if you find writing prose makes your ideas flow, but revising prose distracts you with details about the prose or gets you tangled up in a Scrabble vs Anagram problem, you have some options.

Reverse outlining is commonly suggested as a way to approach revision of a prose draft. The “reverse” signals the dominant advice to start with an outline is being subverted here. It’s just outlining but you do it after you’ve got the tangled mess of ideas out of your head and on to a page where you can see it more clearly.

Katherine Firth has a good hack to avoid getting distracted by sentence level details. Print out your messy draft, 2 or 4 to a page (depending on your age and the quality of your vision). You want to be able to read it, but it needs to be small enough to be painful to look at tiny details.

Big margins are your friend. You need somewhere to jot notes.

Highlighters and/or coloured pens are also going to help, particularly if you already know that colour helps you. (Interest. Novelty. Visual cues.)

If you work in Scrivener, use the synopsis function and write your own synopsis. (The automatic one is just going to grab your first sentence as if this draft has paragraphs that start with key points.) You can then use the Corkboard View to see just the synopses.

You can do the same thing manually with post-it notes. Make sure to make some kind of annotation so you can reconnect your post-it with the original text if you need to.

You don’t have to reuse text from that first draft.

I learned this from an episode of the Ink in Your Veins Podcast from a couple of years ago. And it completely sidesteps that whole Scrabble vs Anagrams problem for those of us who find it easier to think in prose than in bullet points.

Have you ever written a shopping list and then forgotten to take it to the store with you? And have you discovered that you remembered pretty much everything on it? (This only works if *you* wrote the whole list, not if you left a list someone else wrote.)

Well, a similar thing can work for a freewritten draft. You write as a way to get the ideas out of your head onto paper. The process of writing forces you to organize them somewhat and involves really focusing on this particular thing.

When you are done, you have learned a lot about what this thing could be.

If looking at that draft gets you distracted and lost, or sparks new ideas and side quests, you don’t have to look at it.

Trust that the process helped you untangle your thoughts and write a tiny text and an outline based on what you are thinking now. Then write a new draft based on that. Your earlier draft has served its purpose. You can start with a blank page (and your outline). 

Experiment to find what works

As I’ve said before, you don’t have to become someone else to do this job. You are not broken.

If a particular bit of advice doesn’t work for you, you can experiment to figure out what does.

Don’t dismiss it out of hand. It might just need tweaking. Maybe it doesn’t work for you *as a way to start* but it will work once you’ve done something else first.

Getting really specific about what gets you stuck will help. You can’t solve a problem if you don’t know what the problem is.

If you are neurodivergent, use what you know about how your brain works to help you identify the problem and possible solutions. By “what you know”, I mean what you’ve learned from research or other people talking about their experiences *and* what you know from your own experience.

Crucially, don’t be afraid to try things. Just because it doesn’t turn out the way you hoped (or the way someone else thought it would), doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time to try it.

• Why did you want to try this thing?
• What do you hope will happen?
• What did happen?
• What did you learn about what works and doesn’t work for you?

You don’t want to throw out the benefits of divergent thinking for generating new insights and knowledge with the bathwater of its drawbacks for writing linear prose.

You can do this!

Related Posts:

Untangling your thoughts as you write

Making Decisions about your writing

This post was originally sent to the General Newsletter on 21 February 2025.