# How to Fast Draft in One Session - without the Help of AI I love AI Chat Bots. But when it comes to writing, I am not happy with it. It produces text copy that just feels... I don’t know, slightly off. But, when I write myself, I run into a series of problems: ## Problems while Fast Drafting 1. **The Content Problem:** I want to write high quality texts that integrate the wisdom of others. And I want to challenge my thinking while I am writing. Both are difficult to achieve with a pure braindumping style of drafting. 2. **Stuck in Fear:** I learned from [[Jessica Brody]], that I don’t get drafts done because of fear. Not being perfect, others not liking it, not being complete... In my case, the fear of never finishing because as my busy neurodivergent brain will never return to a document. Writing and editing are mutually exclusive. 3. **The Structure Problem:** Good thoughts need structure. But structure makes writing slow. 4. **Ideas while writing:** As I challenge myself in writing, I will have ideas that might belong at the beginning of the text, or even change the structure altogether. But to write fast, I need to stay where I am. Otherwise I’ll end up in an endless loop. 5. **Too long**. It’s that simple. 6. **Technical:** That’s a special problem I have because I work in [[Obsidian]]: [[progressive highlighting]] in markdown is virtually impossible because the highlights need to be nested precisely if I want the result to look as intended. ## The Hack Here’s my way to overcome all this. It combines ideas from [[Jessica Brody]]‘s [[Fast Drafting Course]], the [[How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method|Snowflake Method]] by [[Randy Ingermanson]], and the idea of [[progressive highlighting]] by [[Tiago Forte]]. 1. **==We start by writing down some questions.==** We need some prompts to get the juice flowing. So before writing, we ask good questions - or add the high level questions of our favorite framework. **This solves the Content Problem.** 2. **==Then we fastdraft==** - writing forward, no edits allowed, no breaks, just writing, writing, writing. Until the juice runs out. We become crappy writers, we don’t care about structure or anything. We just dump. **This solves the “Stuck in Fear” Problem.** 3. **==Then, we fastdraft again - but this time, we add subpoints.==** So instead of reinventing the wheel, we just cut our text in pieces and wherever we feel we need to add explanation, detail, a list, or an example, we just do. But - we do not add more than one additional level in each direction: Upwards, we add headings. Downwards, we can add lists or bullets. But never more than one level. We want the hierarchy to stay flat. And, as we’re still in fast drafting, we are not allowed to delete text. At the max, copy paste reordering of larger sections is ok. **This solves the Structure Problem AND the “Ideas while writing” Problem.** 4. ==**Now, it’s time for progressive highlighting**==. We read and bold whatever we find important - including structuring elements. Then, we do a second run, highlighting in color what is the core of the bold parts. Usually this is enough, for very complex texts, you might add an italic round. Then, we summarize the highlights - paragraph by paragraph. The easiest way to do it is to just open a new document - and rewrite. So your final text is actually the summary lines from the first draft. Nothing else. And as we write anew - we don’t give a damn about the “how to copy highlights” thing. **This solves the “Too long” problem and also the tedious technical part.** 5. **==Finally, we do a last quick editing run looking for mistakes==**. And bang - in no time, we created a great first draft that is rich, complete, concise, structured, and incorporates the ideas of others. All this without any help of AI. It took me 50 minutes to write the text you’re currently reading from inspiration to publication using this method while developing it. Enjoy. %% --- > [!links]- Parent`INPUT[suggester(optionQuery(""), useLinks(true),allowOther): file_parent]` > File Type: `INPUT[text:["file_type"]]` > Aliases: `INPUT[inlineList:["aliases"]]` > Related Processes: `INPUT[inlineListSuggester(optionQuery(""), useLinks(true),allowOther ): ["related_processes"] ]` > Related People: `INPUT[inlineListSuggester(optionQuery(""), useLinks(true),allowOther): ["related_contacts"] ]` > Related Organizations: `INPUT[inlineListSuggester(optionQuery(""), useLinks(true),allowOther): ["related_organizations"] ]` > ![[Parent and Child Links.base#Children]] `BUTTON[child_from_template]`