Gavin F. Hurley, author of The Playbook of Persuasive Reasoning; Twitter @Gavin_F_Hurley

As writers, we value productivity. We seek to produce paragraphs, pages, articles, stories, and books—all the while, acknowledging word counts and perimeters of publishers. Yet, sometimes we get in our own way. Word count can control our work too much. It can cripple a productive writing process.

As a professor of writing, I’ve found that university student writers often face this common obstacle. They can focus on word count to the detriment of the quality of the writing itself. And overlook the overall process. For example: if an assignment requires 300 words, students may successively write three paragraphs of 100 words each in a linear fashion until they hit 300 words. After all, 100 + 100 + 100 = 300, right?

Nevertheless, this unidirectional approach can be problematic for writers of all levels. When word count drives the drafting, writers can incrementally add content until they reach a numerical target. It ignores the time it takes to thoroughly revise a draft. It undercuts the importance of deletion.

In a more robust writing process, quality drives the drafting, rather than word count. Such a drive celebrates both addition and subtraction. Therefore, “x = a + b + c” can evolve into something like “x = a + b + c + d + e – c – e.” It requires creative construction so we have something to purposefully ponder and eventually reduce. When strategically overwriting, our drafting becomes more nimble. We have more room to experiment with compelling ideas and impactful language.

As a writer who regularly publishes essays and articles, I have come to depend on this strategy. To this day, I overwrite and cut approximately one-third of my content than what appears in the submitted work. I apply it to all types of writing: shorter online articles like this one (my draft peaked at 1,862 words and I kept 1,220), academic articles (I draft about 10,000 words and keep about 7,000 words), and books (in a recent nonfiction manuscript, I drafted about 100,000 words and I’m keeping about 80,000).

I understand that overwriting may seem like wasted time and words. It may feel counterproductive. But it doesn’t have to be. It offers the following advantages:

Thinking onto the page

Whether writing fiction or nonfiction, we need to ensure that our ideas make sense from various angles. Nonfiction writers organize their arguments and research their theses. Fiction writers focus their imaginative vision and research narrative elements to make their stories believable.

But this labor doesn’t need to stay in our heads. Instead, we can pour it out onto the page. And even if we end up deleting the product of our labor, so what? The act of writing ultimately helped us think through the ideas.

This approach encourages us to think and imagine in new ways. When we transcribe our thoughts into language, stories, and arguments, we grant ourselves new angles of vision. We can more tangibly experience the logic and imagination through our own written expression. As a result, we explore new possibilities about a topic—or learn new things about our own fictional creations.

“Writing to think” or “writing to learn” helps us resist unidirectional drafting. It combats a temptation to try to polish ideas before sharing them with the page: a process that can slow our momentum and introduce unnecessary stress. We do not live in the quill-and-parchment days of the Middle Ages or the typewriter days of the 1980s: writing is not permanent when typing on a word processor. Modern technology allows us to flexibly overwrite, reshape, and reduce our work. So let’s take advantage of that.

Cherry-pick with readers in mind

Ideas read differently on the page than how they sound within our heads. Moreover, the page offers a space to meet our readers. Therefore, when we write down ideas, they become readable ideas. Content becomes communication. And consequently, we can experience how our ideas may look to other people. Once we leave our own head, we begin to empathize with potential readers. Overwriting, in particular, gives us a way to pick the best material for audiences and markets.

For example, music artists record more songs than they need for an album. Their songs may be fully composed and have been played at live gigs, but they have not been recorded as album-ready tracks. Once they are recorded, artists and producers evaluate the songs. Often, they cherry-pick the best songs to put on the final album. The rest of the songs might not make the cut. Either the songs are not good enough, don’t satisfy a market demand, or don’t match the united vision of the album as a whole.

The same approach can help optimize our writing. Like musicians, we can “record” more writing than we need. Then, we cherry-pick the parts that work best with our overall vision and rhetorical purpose. This selection process can give us more options to unite our compositions and optimize reader experience.

Don’t delete—instead, subtract and save

We become attached to everything we write on the page. This is natural. We can feel frustrated or discouraged when we scrap sentences or chop paragraphs. It can damage our confidence as writers. Therefore, we need to nurture—and not neglect—our own morale as we prune our overwriting.

Consequently, we may want to adopt a new paradigm. To distance ourselves from negative feelings, we can fool ourselves into not seeing subtraction as deletion at all. In fact, we don’t even have to delete any of our writing. Rather, we can merely move it away from the polished product.

I tend to move unwanted material to the bottom of the draft or onto blank document. This way, if I want to integrate it back in, I have the option. More importantly, I don’t feel like I have wasted time by overwriting because, technically, I don’t delete the material. My writing still exists; I merely move the excess to another location.

This approach can certainly strengthen our own morale, but it can also benefit upcoming work. The subtracted fragments are still our own. If we ever lack ideas to write about for a future project, we can revisit this auxiliary content. It may offer a seed of a thesis or a kernel of a story that can blossom into a workable article, chapter, book, or novel. Maybe next week. Maybe three years from now.

In sum—

Strategic overwriting may seem counterintuitive. After all, a straight line is the fastest way between two points. When driving from New York City to Chicago, we probably wouldn’t drive passed Chicago to Denver and then travel back to Chicago. But effective writing isn’t about how fast we write; rather it is about how well we write. We can embrace a journey that bears the most fruit, even if it may not be the fastest way to get it done.

So, let’s lean into a meandering writing process. The playfulness of overwriting can be a boon—granted that we eventually focus our final products. It can feel just as good to shed paragraphs as it does to build paragraphs. Subtraction can help sharpen our stories, target our messages, and tighten our texts. And this can lead to productive experiences—not because we hit word counts, but because we thoroughly refine our compositions.