Last month I spent a fabulous weekend with a group of afterschool educators who are working on articles for the journal I edit, Afterschool Matters. Each of them got into this retreat on the strength of a written piece that is the culmination of a whole year’s worth of learning, research, and writing.

Nevertheless, the first thing most of them need to do is to start over.

The piece of writing they brought with them is a report on the work they have done. The piece of writing they want to produce is a journal article that brings new knowledge or ideas to the field of afterschool education.

In fact, the purpose of a first draft of almost any piece of writing is different from the purpose of the final piece. The first draft gets your ideas out on paper. It helps you figure out what you have to say and how to say it.

In revising, you do a 180-degree turn. You stop thinking about what you need to say and start thinking about what your audiences need to hear. You move from focusing on me or us to focusing on you, the reader.

More often than not, that means starting over. If you set out to reshape your existing draft into a different whole, you’re likely to produce another “us-centered” piece. The problem is that our words seduce us. Each paragraph, each sentence cries out, “Keep me! Keep me! I’m not that bad!”

Most of us will do better if we start fresh. Now that we know what we have to say, we figure out what the audience needs to hear, and we start writing around that. How can we help our readers understand our point? What do we have to do to bring them around to our way of thinking?

“Surely you’re joking,” you say. “I spent all this time writing this piece and now you want me to trash it?”

Here’s where I want to steal – oops, borrow – a great concept from the afterschool retreat. After the first round of feedback, one participant announced that he was going to begin a “parallel draft.”

He wasn’t going to trash his old draft. He was simply going to start another draft alongside it.

That’s a brilliant way of thinking about it. You don’t have to erase any of what you’ve written. Your old draft is still right there if you need it. In fact, you’ll probably use quite a bit of material from it.

But starting a parallel draft separates you from what you’ve already done so you can focus on what you need to do. You’re not looking at your old us-centered draft, so it can’t seduce you into keeping material that doesn’t suit your audiences’ needs.

Be bold. Think of your new piece as a parallel draft, if it helps. Remind yourself that words are cheap and there are always more where those came from, if it helps. Whatever it takes. You’re more likely to get it right if you start from scratch.

If that doesn’t work, call me. Turning organization-centered ideas into audience-centered copy is what I do.