The best writing mistakes and how to make them.

Make mistakes. Make a lot of them. And make them often. It’s the only way to get your thoughts on paper, and you’ll enjoy the writing process more. I actually damaged some muscles in my hands several years ago, because I was so excited about something I was writing that I spent too many hours pounding the keyboard too hard. Fortunately, my hands recovered after an extended writing break (as in months, not days), but I’m still convinced that the best way to write is with enthusiastic, mistake-laden abandon. Here’s why.

Uptight writers are the worst kind. I know. I’ve been one.

Uptight writers don’t make mistakes. They censor and filter every thought long before it gets out of their head and onto the page. They’re too careful, too cautious. In sports, this is called “playing not to lose.” And it rarely breeds champions.

I almost got fired from my job as a junior advertising copywriter because I was such an uptight writer. I was working overseas, writing in a language I barely understood (British English). It was my first real job. I wanted to do well. And I got yelled at a lot. Fortunately, the story had a very happy ending. Along the way, I learned how to get more mistakes into my copywriting, and it made me a better writer.

So how can you learn to make more mistakes?

Simple. Save the editing for after the writing. If you edit your thoughts before you get them down on paper – or onto your computer – you’ll squeeze the life out of your message. You may even choke it off completely. Don’t just sit there, staring at your blank page, struggling to come up with the perfect opening. If you do, nothing will seem good enough. Instead, start writing. Write anything. Write something that you don’t even like that much. Write something full of half-baked ideas, awkward wording, and other mistakes.

In other words, write the way you clean out a closet.

How do you clean out a closet? You fling open the door, dump everything on the floor, and start sorting stuff into piles. Writing is the same. You start the process by dumping all your thoughts and ideas onto the page – then you begin to sort through them. You organize the ideas worth keeping and throw away the trash. You box and label your thoughts: grouping similar ideas together in paragraphs and sections, then labeling them with headings and subheads. If you write something you like, but don’t know where to put it, save it in your pile of scraps (to see Helpful advice on saving your scraps, click here).

For a short email, this whole closet-cleaning process only takes a few minutes. For a major presentation, it can take hours. No matter what you’re working on, this is a much faster, more productive way to write and write well.

What to do with your mistakes after you’ve made them.

Once you’ve made your mistakes, get rid of them. The best mistakes are the ones you made early in the writing process. Making them helped get your writing going. Now that you’ve got all your ideas down and your document is taking shape, you can afford to be a perfectionist. Proofread carefully. Do it again. Then get someone else to proofread your document. After all, the good mistakes are the ones you make while trying to get your thoughts on paper – not the ones that slip through to your final draft.