#1: Prewriting

My father used to say,

“I can read writin’, but I can’t write readin’.”

He was expressing a common feeling, that writing is just plain hard.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t wrong. I’m a professional writer, and I often find myself sweating little drops of blood. So I certainly understand that writing is, for most of us, hard work.

But my goal with this blog is to make all your writing tasks as easy as possible. I’ll be giving you the tools, tricks and tips to develop your writing skills and use them to succeed - to do better in your job or business, achieve a promotion, fulfil your dreams.

What is Prewriting?

The novelist John Gardner once said,

‘All the work is done out walking.’

What he was really referring to was the process called prewriting. Prewriting is simply the steps you take before attempting a first draft. It makes the difficult task of writing easier because when you sit down to write, you actually know what you’re going to say.

And, yes. Sometimes it is as simple as taking a walk. I walk my dogs every day, and it’s a rare walk when I don’t inhale some new ideas for whatever I’m working on while I take in the damp bog air.

And I never take my Ipod! Plugging music into your ears has its place, but it shuts down the mind.

Although prewriting can indeed take place casually - taking a walk, having a shower, driving, mowing the lawn, washing the cat - it is nevertheless a deliberate activity.

You have to make yourself open to ideas; think consciously about the writing project facing you and then go clean out the gutters or polish the silver (does anybody actually do that?).

Listing

But there are more structured ways to prewrite, designed to get your brain ready for the discipline of wrestling words into sentences.

Listing is a simple one that particularly suits linear thinkers. When you face a difficult writing task, simply make a list of the elements you already know should be included, then see if they suggest a logical order.

For instance, if you’re going to write a letter complaining about the service in a hotel, begin by listing each incident that annoyed or inconvenienced you. Start randomly, then revisit the list and try to put it in order - maybe chronological, or perhaps in ascending order of severity. With that simple list (much easier to write than actual sentences) you’ll already have the content and structure for your letter.

Before you’ve started, you’re nearly done!

Outlining

A more structured form of listing, and even more popular with linear thinkers, is outlining. You’ve probably been taught a version of outlining in school:

I. Topic 1

      i. subtopic

           a) explanation 1

           b) explanation 2

II. Topic 2 …

PAINFUL! No wonder writing seems so hard!

To be an effective prewriting technique, outlining should be loose, fluid, and based on how your mind works. The process looks something like this:

• Let ideas come to you, then jot them down in a list.
• Look for relationships between elements in the list and group them together.
• Indent those that seem to support the ones above them.
• Indent a second (or third, etc) time for smaller supporting points, details.
• Reconsider all the unindented ideas: are they in a logical order? (Chronological, ascending or descending order of importance, increasing or decreasing complexity, etc).
• Move things around until you feel inspired to write.

This last point is key, and I’ll explain after offering two more techniques - ’scatterbrain,’ and freewriting:

Scatterbrain

‘Scatterbrain’ is my term for a technique variously referred to as ‘brainstorming,’ ‘mind map,’ ‘clustering,’ etc, developed not just by writers but by psychologists and linguists as well. There are dozens of related methods, but I’ve found that in my teaching experience my students have found this scatterbrain approach most effective.

A bit of visualisation: Think of your head as a jar of confetti. (Come on, this is fun.) Imagine standing before a huge sheet of blank paper, unscrewing the top of your head, and shaking it all over the page.

See it? Beautiful, isn’t it? See how the different colours form bright, splashy patterns, how the star shapes make fancy constellations, and so on?

Our minds are brilliant at creating order out of chaos …

… if we can only get ourselves to face the chaos first.

That’s what the scatterbrain techique does. It gets ideas onto the page, without judgement, so you can look at them, and begin to see patterns, connections between ideas. Try this:

• Think of your project as a single word.
• Write that word in the centre of a blank sheet of paper*.
• Think of any other word or phrase that comes to mind.
• Write it anywhere on the page.
• Write the next term that pops into your head.
• Keep going, as fast as you can, without judging.
• Try to clutter the page with as many words as possible - quantity, not quality is your goal.

*Don’t use a computer. I actually recommend crayons or coloured markers instead of pen or pencil - anything to make you feel like a kid. Heck, hold the crayon in your fist, and stick your tongue out while you’re at it!

Once you’ve filled the page, and your energy begins to wane, stop. Look at the page. Do you see connections between certain words? Circle them. (Or highlight them in a colour … whatever). Draw lines between related ideas. Use arrows. Exclamation points. Smiley faces.

Soon, something remarkable will happen. Random ideas will begin to force themselves into sentences in your mind. You’ll begin to feel impatient to share those ideas, to explore and expand them. It’s called inspiration, and you’re ready to write!

Freewriting

This technique is best when you are least inspired. If you have no idea whatsoever of what to write about, freewriting can get the ball rolling.

It’s pretty self-explanatory. The process is simple:

• You can use either a computer or notepad - whatever you’ll be using for the actual writing project is best.
• Give yourself a timeframe - I find 3 - 5 minutes is plenty.
• Ensure you have no distractions - turn off your phone, ignore the doorbell, muzzle the cat.
• Make an absolute commitment to write for the designated time, without stopping.
• Now, write. If the only thing you can think about is how dumb the exercise is, write about that.
• Write about how your hand feels, or what colour the walls are, or what you plan to eat for dinner.
• Anything, as long as you keep writing, and don’t stop.
• I mean it.
• Don’t stop.
• Don’t lift your pen from the paper; don’t let your hands leave the keys.
• You’ll get cramps. I don’t care. Keep going.
• Then, when the time is up, STOP!

Most of what you’ve written, maybe all of what you’ve written, will be rubbish. That’s okay. In fact, it’s inevitable. (Good writing, as we’ll discuss in later posts, comes through revision).

But look, first, at how much sheer text you’ve been able to generate in no time at all. This has the effect of giving you confidence in your ability to string words together.

Then re-read what you’ve written. Isn’t there something in there worthy of a bit more writing? Eight times out of ten, there is. A phrase, maybe. A sentence. An idea.

If not, guess what the solution is? Yup. Try again. There is nothing quite as seductive to the muses as a writer writing, so get that pen moving, get those fingers tapping, until inspiration finally strikes.

Inspiration

And that’s the whole point. Prewriting is so easy and, for most people, so fun, that the real challenge is to know when to stop.

And here’s the answer:

When inspiration strikes.

Prewriting, whether it be a relatively formal outline or a jaunt with a pooch, is entirely about igniting the spark of desire to write that we call ‘inspiration.’ When it’s lit, quit. Prewriting, that is. You’re now ready for your first (rough!) draft.