The Writing Process . . .

The Writing Process . . .

I’ve got some extra time while Christmas dinner cooks, so I’m going to try to make multiple posts today.

I’ll start with some thoughts on the writing process that I hope will be helpful both to those who regard themselves as writers and business people who sometimes must write . . . or recruit professional writers . . . as part of their job.

Every writer is unique, and therefore experiences the writing process in a different way.

In fact, for professional writers, they can experience the writing process differently for different kinds of projects.

But, there are certain phases that all writers go through along the way.

Writers who have a dedication to the craft . . . whether professional writers or not . . . at least implicitly recognize each of these phases.

For those who must do some writing on the job but write infrequently and reluctantly, it might have some usefulness to read up a bit on these stages.

The first phase is what my professors back in the day called “prewriting.”  The prewriting stage can involve several sub-stages.  For example, if you have a topic assigned to you, then there’s no dreaming up a topic entirely on your own.  But for many college papers, for example, you must create a topic.  Then, there’s the interim situation:  you have to choose but you have a handful of possible topics provided to you by a professor or a standardized test.

Once you have your topic, the next question is whether or not it involves research.  If it does, then research is the second sub-set of the prewriting phase.

Next, there is the planning phase.  Depending on your project, this may involve outlining or some other method.

Those are the basics of the prewriting phase.

The next part of the writing process is composition:  which can take several forms.

Nowadays, many people compose right into their word processors or text editors.  Some, however, prefer to start out with a longhand draft.  For some professional writers, such as myself, it depends on the project.  I write much content directly to a word processor; but I still write fiction and unusual projects in longhand.

So, for those who start with longhand, “production” becomes a separate stage of the writing process.  Others may disagree, but I would include referencing in the “production” phase, so for researched material even those who compose directly onto a word processing or text editing system will have a bit of a production stage.

Finally, there is the review and revise stage of the writing process.  This involves rearranging material in a more reader-friendly order, checking grammar and spelling and that kind of thing.

Those are, essentially, the elements of the writing process.

For the most part, “submission” is not part of the writing process.  That’s either marketing, if you are submitting to a publisher, for example.  Or, if you are submitting an assigned project on the job, it’s customer service.  The exception may involve student tests and term papers, where the submission consists merely of handing over the project, in person, to a professor for grading.  In a sense, submission in that form is neither fish nor fowl.

Marketing and customer service are, perhaps, a topic for another time.

For more information about the business aspects of writing, visit my professional website at:

www.kristawriter.com