I’m currently working on another writing project (Yay! All will be revealed later!)and I thought I’d share my writing process with you.
I generally write in the afternoons but sometimes I change that to the morning. The morning is usually me reading email, perusing the Web while I have breakfast, writing in my journal, and catching up on the news (although not nearly as much news as I used to read—this is a good thing!). This is also usually when I write blog posts.
I work on big writing projects in the afternoon, and I use pomodoros to do this. I usually write for 1-2 hours (that’s 2-4 pomodoros) and then I’m done for the day. I don’t have word goals, I have time goals.
I work on a rough draft until it’s “done”, in the sense that I’ve reached the end of the story I was trying to tell. I do not re-read at all during this stage. I might read the last few lines of what I wrote the day before, in order to get back into the groove of my train of thought, but that’s as much as I’ll do.
The second phase is the LET IT SIT phase. I like to let big projects (like books) sit for at least a month, so I can let it coalesce and I can get appropriate distance from the project. After a month (at least!), I head into the third phase, which is revising. During revising, I’m pretty critical, but I don’t delete anything; I keep a document called “scrap”, where I’ll place sections that I’ve cut. (I don’t delete them because I might want them later!) Revising is generally a slower process than writing because I’m being more critical and I’m trying to shape the document into something cohesive, as opposed to the “word vomit” of the first phase.
After revising, we hit the second Let It Sit phase. This is also about a month. At the end of this phase, I have choices. I can either ask a writer friend to look at what I’ve done so far and offer feedback, or I can do another round of revising before I offer it to someone else to read.
These are my basic steps. What happens after step five is fungible. I might let it sit again, I might think about submitting it somewhere, I might do a lot of things. But the first five stages always happen.
So there you go—my writing process! Questions? Drop them in the comment box below and I’ll answer them.