Prewrite

First Draft

Five Steps

There are 5 Steps in the Writing Process:

1) Prewriting - Generating ideas, and ideas about your ideas.

2) First Draft - Getting everything you have to say on paper, without second guessing it.

3) Edit - Changing your draft, honing the style, adding description, thinking about purpose and audience, tailoring your writing for the best possible communication...this is where you can make sure you're saying exactly what you want to say in the best possible way.

4) Proofread - Checking for spelling, grammatical and style errors and fixing them.

5) Publish - Anything from letting someone read your work, to sending the email, hading in your paper for evaluation, and/or, of course, formal publishing either on the Internet or with a pulishing company.

Okay…now that you’ve been doing some prewriting, you have a few journal entries with some information and ideas you can expand upon. There are lots of theories about writing, and you’ll have to experiment with several to find the one which best fits your needs, desires, and style. Depending on how you feel about writing, what your task is, and how much of your time you want to devote to it, you may go in several directions.

Because I’m a writer, I tend to believe that writing every day is a good thing. Even if the only thing you use it for is prewriting, I urge you to begin the practice of journaling. The act of pouring out your mind onto a page can be beneficial in many ways, perhaps the least of which is producing a finished written project.

When you have a writing task, many times you can go to your journal and pick out one of your treasures and simply expand upon it to create your first draft. If your task is specific to a topic or goal, you may have to do some additional prewriting to develop a starting point, but I find most of the time even if the topic is predetermined, there’s something about it or relating to it in my journal. For those of you who choose to keep your journal on the computer, it’s even easier to find, for you can simply search a word or phrase to find the bit that relates. I will say, however, in spite of the convenience of the computer searches, I still keep my journal by hand. There’s something about having to make the pen move on paper that gets my creative muses singing. In seeming contrast, I also always type first drafts on the computer. It makes it easier to edit and I type much faster than I write, so when I get into that writing zone I’m not stymied by the limitations of my writing speed.

The first draft is like prewriting, but in the first draft we try to write everything we have to say about a topic without censoring or judging the way it comes out. I ALWAYS turn off spell check and grammar check when I’m writing my first draft, because I find those little red and green squiggly lines horribly distracting. If I’m constantly going back to “fix” something to make them disappear, I’m destroying my own creative flow and trying to edit while I’m writing the first draft, which results in disaster for my writing.

Stephen King, in his book On Writing says,

“…it’s all on the table, all up for grabs. Isn’t that an intoxicating thought? I think it is. Try any goddamn thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous” (196).

Follow this advice! Write until you have said everything you have to say about your topic, and in any way you choose to say it. Don’t worry about your grammar, punctuation, spelling, or even about how artful or staid your prose is. Just get the ideas out and keep the tap open until the well (on that topic) is dry.

Works Cited

King, Stephen. On Writing. First Edition, Hardcover. New York: Scribner, 2000.