My Secret to Writing Everyday Was to Have a Lot of Drafts

Today is Draft Day 2025 where Medium tries to encourage us to get that draft that’s sitting in our draft folder (or our head) onto the page and published.

I’ve had two long stretches of regular writing on Medium, the longest was 268 consecutive weekdays and ended when I officially got offered a job to work here rather than just publish here.

The first fifty days of that stretch were driven by inspiration — I just had a lot of “drafts in my head” and they were both easy and exciting to get written down.

But after that I had to learn what I call the ability to manufacture writing. There are two people who inspired me to see “manufacturing” as both a necessary skill and a virtue:

• Cory Doctorow with a quote that “if surgeons can’t get surgeons block, then writers shouldn’t allow themselves to have writers block.”
• My friend Jim O'Grady, who has never written on Medium but should, who told me a saying he heard on the Moth Storytelling circuit: “Everyone can tell one story, but if you can tell two then you are a storyteller.”

Both quotes motivated me to try to develop a toolbox for writing even when I wasn’t inspired. That’s what I mean by being able to manufacture writing.

By far the best tool in that toolbox was to have a lot of drafts. I had answers on Quora, comments on HackerNews, emails, Slack posts, responses on Medium. But most importantly, I had a lot of half formed thoughts sitting in my Drafts folder here on Medium. Here’s what my current “Your Stories” section looks like: 801 DRAFTS!

I never named this tool from my writing toolbox, but if I had to give it a name I think it could aptly be called “Inspiration Fishing.”

Usually the initial draft never made it beyond the stage of comment or partial thought because I didn’t have the inspiration and motivation at the time to go further. But every time I went back to my drafts I’d find at least one that somehow, almost by magic, felt ready to finish.

A sort of recent example, in 2023 I went deep into my drafts folder and fished out something that I hadn’t touched since 2013. It was about an important (to me) test of my work ethic and at the time of my draft I just couldn’t quite find a coherent through line that would let me finish. But ten years later, somehow the task seemed obvious and clear.

So I finished it, submitted it to the Runner’s Life pub here on Medium, and got that high that I think we all feel as writers: I published something that other people are reading.

Who knew, when I went to my file of 800 drafts that the fish that was going to inspire me was a draft all the way back from 2013? But that’s the beauty of starting lots of drafts — eventually they become the asset that powers you to finish.