Today’s post is a brief prompt: next time you sit down to write something at a computer (an email, an essay, a resignation—anything), try getting through the entirety of the first draft without pressing the backspace key.
This can be a lot harder than it sounds. If your experience is anything like mine, you might get the sense that your fingers seem to have an editorial mind of their own.
Working without the backspace key has become fundamental to my drafting process. Paired with a timer and a word goal (say, 500 words in 60 minutes) it can yield a crappy first draft remarkably quickly. For me that is useful, because the first draft is almost always crappy anyway.