Focus, Felt Sense, and Finesse: an abbreviated process for fast writing

Writing should happen quickly. To be more precise, drafting should happen quickly and with abandon. Followed by editing and rewriting, which should be slower and more methodical.

As writers hone their craft, they also learn to take the capacious journey of the writing process—idea, collect, focus, draft, revise, publish—and give it a home in their busy schedules. For many newer writers, this feels like packing a week's worth of clothes into a carry-on while chasing the plane.

And they learn. Typically the hard way, but we all learn to make the writing process work wherever we write. Because writing happens everywhere—in board rooms, at bar fronts, at a beat writer's desk. And where writing happens, there the writing process shall be.

Writers also learn that time feels fickle, if not capricious. And bosses or managing editors or clients come to you, dear purveyor of prose, with the dreaded "time-sensitive" request (which remains one of our clumsiest work euphuisms).

When you have more process than time

Few things flush the writer's body with anxiety like having more process and less time.

You're familiar with having time to think, time to write to help you think, time to rethink you're writing, and so on. Now, you’ve got a blank page, 200 to 300 words due, and thirty minutes.

I've seen in many writers (and in myself) how a quick-turn assignment magnifies the pressure of nailing it the first time. They envision needing to think, draft, and edit simultaneously—sort of a writer's version of "everything everywhere all at once" (read: more anxiety).

Instead of tossing aside the writing process at large and opting for the brute-force approach of "one and done," adjust the process.

Try what I call "focus, felt sense, and finesse."

Felt sense

What is "felt sense"? I first encountered it from writing teacher Peter Elbow, who credits the psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin for the term. Felt-sense words are those first words you *feel* are close to the meaning you have in mind, but they’re not the right words—yet. When you’re drafting, writing those “felt sense” words is helpful because

1. They create a bridge you’ll travel back and forth between your brain and the page. It’s infinitely easier to edit what's on the page than what's in your head.

2. They help you approximate what you will say. Sure, you wrote "dilemma" (to make a difficult choice) when "difficulty" (a hardship not always contingent on a choice) was what you were looking for, but the first word carried the "felt sense" of hardship and tension, and it brought you one word closer to the end.

So how might you use this process to write something quickly? Let's say you have thirty minutes.

Here's the plan

1. Take the first minute to breathe. Try some box breathing. Consider where your shoulders are resting (Are they up near your ears? Or down and at rest?) Even under pressure, the effective writer is the relaxed writer.

2. For the next five minutes, find your focus: the statement encapsulating the one thing you need to say to reach the reader. Strive to create a complete thought, one that is balanced around a one-word action verb (Ex.: Responsible budget cuts require empathetic pragmatism.). But don’t get bogged down cooking up your focus. A half-baked focus (Budget cuts are difficult.) is better than no focus. But have something: the gravitational pull from the black hole of a missing focus pulls all possible focuses toward itself, creating chaos.

3. Make a plan now to reserve a minute or two to step away from your draft to let it “air out.” Plan a trip to get water. Go thumb through a book you're still not reading. Whatever you do, put space between you and the screen. Think of these few moments not as inconsequential but as an investment in the future clarity of your writing.

4. Then plan for five to eight minutes to finesse: check your words, punctuation, and connections. Your mindset here is that of the cool, calm, and collected secret agent who has minutes to find the armed bomb—not of the storied detective who somehow has infinite time and resources. You may have to settle with your antagonist (in this case, the perfect piece of writing) getting away. For now, your minutes are dedicated to finding the hidden bombs of misunderstanding, redundancy, and inaccuracy. Read your draft aloud, reading it top to bottom (to check for flow), then a little slower bottom to top (to check for mechanics).

That leaves fourteen to seventeen minutes to draft. That may not feel like a lot, but don’t discount the writing you’ve done in your head as you worked out your focus. Use this time to do the one thing you need to do: write.

If you’ve shot for your focus and written what feels close to what you need to say, you stand a great chance of making the minutes count as you finesse your draft before hitting “send” or “print.”

Happy writing