Develop a Writing Practice

Writing is a process. Becoming a proficient and productive writer takes practice.

Think of all your writing as a practice.
The more you practice, the more your writing will improve.

There's a major difference between professional and amateur writers: the professionals know that writing is a process. And since it’s a process, anything you write can be fixed — but you need to write it first.

Here’s the process:

*    Drafting

*    Outlining

*    Writing

*    Revision

*    Editing

Drafting is simply getting something down on paper, or onto the computer screen. A draft for an article, may just be a sentence, or it can be 1,000 or more words. It’s a rough outline, a sketch.

An outline can be a simple list. It can be a stack of index cards, or a mind map. How you outline doesn’t matter. It won’t resemble the outlines you wrote in school. However, an outline is something which gives you an entree into a piece of writing, so create one, no matter how short or long it is.

After creating your outline, start writing. Write anything you like. I’m sure you’ve heard of Anne Lamott’s "shitty first drafts".

Write. It will be shitty. That’s OK. You can fix it.

Once you’ve written, you can revise. To revise, is to re-view: to look at something again, and perhaps see it in a fresh light. You can add material, delete entire chapters — anything you choose.

Go back to your brief for the project: your project description. Inevitably, you’ll see that you’ve wandered away from the brief. Revise, until your material matches the brief.

Finally, once the structure of the material is in place, and your material matches the brief, you can edit. Editing is the final stage of the writing process for many projects. However, it may not be. When you’re writing a long project like a book, editing may just be the step on the way to a fresh draft. Many novelists write three or four complete drafts, before the project is done.

Exercise 11. Practice — write something just for fun.

Today, write and article or short story, just for fun. Remember the stages of the writing process, and follow them.

Once you’ve completed this small project, think about the process. Did having a process make writing easier?