Prewrite

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.

Q: How do you climb a mountain? A: One lighthearted but laborious step at a time.

Prewriting is the key to finding out what you really want to say. It can be used when you know what you need to write, or when you have been assigned a general writing task and you’re not sure what it should be about. It allows you to generate ideas, to create groups of memories, images, and relationships between thoughts…all to be further developed in the next steps of the writing process. You can start with a grand idea or just a couple of words.

Generating ideas is “priming the pump,” or getting the flow rolling. The way our brains work is by keeping the most pertinent information right on top. Even if we’re in school, we’re likely to be distracted by such daily tasks as our children’s needs, the shopping we have to do, how much money we do or do not have, who has pissed us off recently…. We keep in the forefront of our thoughts whatever we need in the moment, whatever we have to do next, whatever we are emotionally attached to. It is in prewriting we get to dump the top part of our minds and examine the musty bits underneath; when we polish the dust off, we find these are treasures capable of moving, educating, including and changing others.

The most important thing to keep in mind during prewriting is not to censor yourself. Write what you feel, what you think, what you know. Use all the words you have, even the “bad” ones. Use slang, use big words, use shorthand. Write and write and write some more. Ideas are yours, even if you’ve heard them before. The creative part is not in finding an original idea—but in your unique perspective on that idea.

Another very important action when prewriting is to keep your pen on the paper. Even if you’re repeating the same sentence a few times, or you write, “I have no ideas,” keep writing. What I’ve found is if I keep writing, sooner or later my reluctant brain starts to spill deep thoughts onto the page without much effort. First, though, I have to stop resisting. I have to say to myself, “I’m going to sit down and write.” And I have to allow myself the time to do it. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense at first, or if you don’t like it. When you are starting out, you’re really not qualified to judge your own writing anyway. Just keep the pen moving on the paper. Write for twenty minutes without stopping.

What usually happens is you dump the top of your brain onto the paper first. The things you have to do, the things you’ve just done, the person you’re upset with, the person you’re in love with. As you continue, however, you’ll start delving deeper into your brain for the bits that are truly unique, and you’ll often surprise yourself with some brilliant turn of phrase, or an idea you didn’t even realize you had. These are the gems.

I know of four excellent prewriting techniques, and I use them all, depending on how I feel or what my writing task is. They are: Word Association, Mind-Mapping, Journaling and Cubing.