Gilson: Write freely, and then rewrite

Ever drop something down the crevice between your car's front seat and the center divider, and then strained, and strained, and strained, and strained and yet failed to recover it? That's how some people feel when they have to write something for work: pressure, fear, pain.

Too many people try to survive by straining to produce what they think is "writing" — based on some constipated notion of "the one and only right way" to do the job.

Instead, try this: Forget all preconceptions, relax and just pour out words that help you say what you mean.

Avoid pursuing perfection; do not edit as you write.

If you think about what you want to write and who your reader will be, you can create an outline that will guide you through the writing.

Good writing results from rewriting.

Rewriting begins after you read your draft aloud and identify any confusion. One all-too-common error is allowing key elements of a sentence to drift far apart, causing a reader to reread the sentence to grasp its meaning.

Even accomplished writers sometimes drift. Take Frank Bruni, a gifted writer who just retired from the New York Times but still writes a weekly newsletter that the Times publishes.

He recently wrote about the violent TV fantasy "Squid Game."

"Anonymous villains load the boxed corpses of hundreds of contestants who've been gunned down for their failures into incinerators," he wrote.

Gunned down for their failures into incinerators? That makes no sense. Of course, he meant that the contestants who were gunned down for their failures were loaded into incinerators.

The phrase "into incinerators" drifted too far from the verb "load" and thus forced a reader to work too hard to make sense of what Bruni knew he meant, but that he fuzzed up. Between "load" and "into incinerators," he placed 14 words.

Result: No more drift and a strong ending.