looking for things I lost along the way

As somebody who is by nature horribly finicky about word choice and sentence structure, I swear one of the most liberating realizations I’ve had in my entire existence as a writer has been the fact that in a rough draft I can just leave words out if I needed to. And if I mark the missing bits with something that I don’t use anywhere else (I usually use [ ] or [...]) then I can just ctrl+F that thing when I’ve got everything else in place, and go back to figure out how to fill in the blanks.

(Or figure out if I even need to, as half the time the idea or sentence structure that my brain was so insistent had to be right there or nothing was going to work ever turns out to have been completely unnecessary once more of the thing was written.)

Which is super useful for actually getting through things! Because sometimes I've got a sentence that would be completely fine, except there's a word or two I just can't quite find, and the sentence won't work without them--or sometimes I'm writing dialogue and I think I need an action or introspection beat somewhere for it to flow correctly, but I don't quite know what it needs to be. And if I'm not careful, I'll get so caught up in trying to figure it out then and there that I'll completely stall out.

Then again, sometimes all I've got is a vague sentiment and a word or two, and so my draft will be going along just fine and then I hit a note that reads: [something something inexorable something, Kitaniji’s a dramatic bastard].

Ah well. Rough drafts gonna rough draft.