Want a Great First Draft? Think First, Write Later

For most writers, writing and thinking are the same event — they conceptualize, organize, write, and revise at the same time. Even planners, who outline and create structure before beginning the draft, will let thoughts unfold in real time, discovering the emotional and rhetorical logic of the piece at the keyboard. Pantsers are even more extreme — for them, drafting is thinking, with the page serving as a sandbox where meaning takes shape. Both methods assume that writing is where the discovery happens.

But what if you let discovery happen before writing? What if you mentally rehearsed, shaped, or tested ideas before a single word hits the page?

A return to the old ways

This approach is known as preconscious composition. It’s not new, and in fact, it’s a return to the way people have created for most of history — before most people could read and write, orators and poets used “invisible drafting,” composing, refining and performing entire speeches and epics from memory.

Inside preconscious composition sits spatial-conceptual composition. This means that you mentally build the architecture for the draft — it’s mental storyboarding, where you can “feel” or “see” where the main components of the piece need to be placed for a satisfying, logical flow.

Preconscious composition means that much of the discovery that we usually would do at the desk happens before the writing session. The writing session itself becomes time merely to record what’s already done in our head. While many writers do some degree of mental writing, it’s uncommon for writers to intentionally structure their entire writing process around it.

Watch/Subscribe

How preconscious composition benefits you

Doing most of the intellectual and emotional heavy lifting before your writing offers distinct advantages:

• Nervous system regulation: Unfolding and refining ideas during activities like cooking or showering combats much of the performance anxiety that can come from “now you must write.” The blank page feels less like a wall and more like a transcription surface, so you can get more joy out of the writing process and not stress about the work as much.
• Integration time: Thoughts have space to breathe and mature rather than being inserted into the page while they’re still undeveloped. They’re able to link to a higher degree, which translates to a more cohesive and relevant overall piece.
• Access to subconscious insight: Many breakthroughs happen when we’re not forcing cognition — our brain’s “default mode network” quietly works in the background. Mentally drafting in a relaxed way can let more creative ideas or phrasings bubble to the surface.
• High content internalization: Preconscious composition places the content in your working memory and body. It’s mentally and even somatically rehearsed. Because you — not the page — are the container for the thinking, having essentially lived the draft before it even exists, it’s easy to repeatedly recreate it the way the ancient orators did. Even if your word processor crashes and you have to start over, the content is safe. If you ever have to do any speaking around the content (e.g., a podcast appearance), you’re already well-prepared for it because you intimately know the draft.
• Physical protection: Writing in your head means you can work on your draft anywhere, anytime, and that writing sessions usually can take less time. You can get up and move, rather than spending the entire day sitting.

How to start practicing the technique

• Set up liminal space: This process depends on quiet, unhurried moments — walks, showers, idle chores. Intentionally build that time into your calendar and use whatever boundaries are necessary to protect it. Time to think is undervalued in our culture, but it’s where we can prime our creative engine and do serious foundational work.
• Incubate: If you’re not used to preconscious composition, you’ll need to train yourself to “hold the piece” mentally in a basic way. Start by asking just one, resonant question about your idea (e.g., “What’s really at stake here?”). Then let the question simmer as you do other things — the brain will keep subconsciously shaping it. If you find yourself returning to a single line or argument, that’s your architecture taking form.
• Visualize: What shape does the piece have to you? Is it circular (returning to an image)? Linear (building to a revelation)? Think of this like music, where every section has tension, pacing, and resolution. The focus isn’t on sentences, but on the larger topography.
• Connect with your body: As you visualize, note how your body reacts. When the shape or structure is right, you’ll likely relax. By contrast, if the structure is “off,” you might feel your chest tighten or fidget.
• Name the emotional spine: Mentally composed pieces usually orbit one emotional truth — curiosity, grief, awe, etc. Name that emotion before you sit down to write. Let it serve as your compass that keeps your tone and pacing cohesive.
• Chunk and expand: When you initially start to practice preconscious composition, you might develop just a small amount of content at a time in your head. Once you have one of those pieces, use a writing session to dump it into a document. Repeat the process until you have all the pieces you need. If there are pieces that feel adjacent but you’re not quite sure if or how they fit, just make a note of it in the document. Then start your next mental composition session with one of those pieces.
  Over time, your working and long-term memory and ability to integrate more pieces in real time will improve, which means you’ll expand the amount of the draft you can mentally write. But initially, resist the temptation to start writing as soon as you know all the pieces are in the document. Instead, see if you can mentally arrange where those pieces need to be first. Then, it’s simply a matter of coming back to the document and shifting the pieces into place — completing the draft after everything is in the right order is easier than trying to compose while the architecture is still jumbled.

The bonus points option

As you get better at mental writing, the next (optional) step is to start integrating the writing into other forms of communication or thinking. For example, as you construct the draft in your head, the auditory rhythm and conceptual impact of certain lines might jump out at you as being ideal for soundbites or pull quotes. Or, do specific images come to mind as you are reading? Maybe that’s the foundation for a video. In the end, you might find yourself constructing entire campaigns in your head, “seeing” or “hearing” all the components in real time as you work on the draft. This is how I work, and it’s one of the reasons I’m able to quickly and consistently share my work in so many different forms of media.

It’s not just writing — it’s brain rewiring

Remember, creating mentally isn’t instinctive for most people. It also doesn’t follow the bulk of modern writing advice, which is often procedural and built on templates to “steal” — i.e., how to format the document or what sequence to follow during the writing session. It will take time to wire your brain to do it well, so don’t expect mastery in just a few days or even a few weeks. But if you stick with it, you’ll learn how to be disciplined in thought, not just wordsmithing. The potential ramifications for your interactions, view of the world, and resulting influence are massive.

[Transcript summary]

Most of us as professionals have really heard of the value of visualization. You run it through in your mind first, so that then you can have success. And that also helps you even with negative scenarios, so that you can pre-plan what to do if things go wrong. But have you ever heard of preconscious composition?

Now, for you creative types, especially writers, what this means is that, basically, you are composing your draft, your outline, those kinds of things, in your head before you sit down to do a draft. You are pre-composing before you even sit down at the keyboard.

Now, that is not how a lot of writers work, even if they are planners, that you write out your outlines ahead of time. Most of the time, we are working our draft through at the keyboard. We are thinking through it and kind of discovering in the moment. Preconscious composition means that you do that work ahead of time.

Now, the biggest benefit that I want to kind of get at here for you writers or other creatives out there, is that when you work this way, then when you actually go to have your session, that session can be short and efficient because you already know what to do. It is, as they say in the movie Amadeus, bibbling and scribbling. You already know what to do.

The second big thing that I really want to hit on is that when you work this way, you internalize what you are creating, which means that, oh, you didn’t save it? It’s here, not in some cloud, whatever. You can recreate it very easily if something goes wrong. If you’re going to speak on it, that internalization really makes it very easy to pull the information and have a conversation about what you’ve created. So, there are huge benefits to it. In my blog post, I break this down really in detail. So, if you want to learn more about it, go there. Take care. Bye.