Education It's A Process

Writing is a process. Opinion? Fact! Many people I know are taken aback when they make an attempt to write a piece of any substantial length. They think like this: "He sits down at his lovely, mahogany desk and gets out his pad of paper or his antiquated typewriter. He flexes his fingers, and grabs his favorite fountain pen or starts typing on the keys. Suddenly, words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters fly onto the paper. After some pre-determined time, Real Writer puts down his pen or takes his fingers off the keys, stretches, sighs a sigh of satisfaction, and gets up from the desk. He brushes his hands together - another successful day of writing done and pages of manuscript in the hopper."- Dawn Goldberg This may be a nice image to have, but it's far from the truth. Real writers actually go through a clearly defined, 3 step process in writing everything longer than one sentence. Before-writing: (For lack of a better term!) Before-writing is pretty much just planning. Throwing ideas around. Chucking everything on paper. Lots of writers have a little book just for scribbling random ideas, quotes, sayings, phrases, or anything that might be useful. It's completely disorganized and looks like it belongs in the bin, but writers live by it! It often winds up being an invaluable source of creativity, and has made many writers rich and famous. This step is crucial, so don't skip it even when you're in a hurry! Writing: Self-explanatory... I hope. This is sometimes the only step anyone takes note of. People think it's a waste of time to plan and edit their work. As long as it's done. Bad idea!!! But you do need something to edit, so while this is the least important of the steps, it's still necessary. Obviously. After-writing: This is the revising and editing of your work. A common misconception with editing is that all this entails is cutting out bad sentences and phrases. Wrong again! In most cases, you've gotta almost re-write the whole piece! If you're looking to create a really good piece of writing, you've got to edit properly, and if that means writing the whole piece over, then do it, don't be lazy. One more thing- don't do all 3 steps at once, which I know is tempting! Don't write whole paragraphs when you plan. Don't edit while you're writing. You need to be able to view your work as a finished product, on which to improve. Okay, knock yourself out!

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