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June 23 - June 25, 2019
Use the inner research phase also to get inside your ideal reader’s head, establishing empathy with the audience. Put yourself in the mind of a reader to understand their perspectives and anticipate their needs.
Using the freewriting technique for inner research: At least one day before you plan to start outlining and drafting, set aside 15–30 minutes to write 750–1,000 words on the topic. Open a file, and give it a name like Thoughts or Notes. The name reinforces the idea that you’re not composing the first draft at this point. Start typing and don’t stop until you’re done with your time. Ask yourself questions. Think about your ideal reader and ask the questions they might have. Let what you have written rest overnight.
You can keep researching until you feel you know everything about your topic. Good luck with that! Chances are, you’ll never be ready to start.
Let’s call this time creative incubation instead of procrastination: delay the focused work so that the Muse can spend time with the ideas. Put off the drafting, not the thinking.
How long does this period last? It depends entirely on the time available and the scope of the work. You may have days or weeks. On a tight deadline, maybe you can dedicate only an hour to incubation before starting. Even if you must compress this stage, try not to skip it.
It's difficult to be creative when you feel pressure to produce copy.
Once you’re doing that activity, remind yourself about the topic you’re working on. Don’t focus on it; let your mind wander, then invite your thoughts to return repeatedly to the subject.
The true test of an outline or structure is the act of writing from it.
Before undertaking any writing project, clarify your objectives. Specifically, understand the audience, the medium, and the purpose of the piece.
Personally, I find technology distracting at this phase. I prefer to grab a piece of paper and start writing down and connecting thoughts and notes. Then I clean it up and consolidate my notes into a concise, comprehensive skeleton of the end result. This eventually becomes an outline in a word processing file.
Avoid committing too strongly to the exact outline. The structure may adapt as you write, particularly for longer works like books.
The drafting phase is neither the start nor the end of the writing process. Don’t set your sights on finishing yet.
If you want to experience the state of flow during writing, your best bet may be to draft quickly and revise at leisure.
The drafting phase may last a single morning if you’re creating something short and simple. It may span days, weeks, or months for a book. Speed often varies by project.
If you enter a state of flow and write for hours without noticing the passage of time, congratulations! More often, you can only focus for a while before the Scribe takes a break, leaving you sitting unproductively at the desk, daydreaming. For projects requiring multiple sessions, set clear objectives: a word count, page count, part of the outline, or amount of focused time. Then commit to achieving them.
Don’t worry about setting down the sections in the order people will read them. Draft those parts of the text that your brain is ready to write. If you've been thinking about a chapter and have thoughts circulating on that topic, work on it. You may end up creating several sections in parallel. Use the revision phase to make sure the whole thing makes sense when assembled in linear order.
Give yourself permission to use lame verbs or awkward phrases if the thoughts are flowing. Beauty and brilliance emerge during revision.
Writing and editing use different neural networks and mental processes. Doing both together requires mental multitasking, which few of us do well.
As you perfect the craft and learn your particular foibles, your first drafts will get better and require less copyediting.
Treat the breaks as mini incubation periods; before you quit a session, make a note about what you plan to work on next.
If good ideas strike when you’re away from the work, write them down where you will see them when you next work.
Remember Csikszentmihalyi’s five phases of creativity? The fifth phase, elaboration, goes on for a while, and itself contains iterative cycles of creativity: “This part of the process is constantly interrupted by periods of incubation and is punctuated by small epiphanies.”
Writing similarly benefits from a period of rest when the first draft is completed. Taking a break gives your brain another opportunity to incubate the concepts in the text. Perhaps more importantly, you need distance to change your perspective on the draft, to switch gears from creator to reviser and editor.
This rest period is an opportunity to put your subconscious brain to work on problems in the draft so far—calling on the Zeigarnick Effect described in the chapter on creativity. Provide a gentle nudge in the right direction by making notes of unresolved issues in the first draft.
Try to let anything sit at least overnight before you start revising, even if it’s a short piece.
The more important the quality of the work, the more time you want to dedicate to revision.
Approach the revision process from the top down, starting with the broadest perspective and working your way into detail: Structural revision: Is everything in the right order? Does the piece hang together? Revision for flow: Can the reader make sense of what you’re trying to say? Revise for readability and comprehension. Copy revision: Look at tone and style, word choice, and grammar. Proofreading: Do the words actually appear on paper as you think they do?
Read through the first draft to assess what you’ve got. It may be better than you think, or it may be worse. Make sure the structure of the piece works at all levels, from the organization to the headings. Here are a few things to check: Headings and subheadings: Can the reader navigate the piece? What happens if someone doesn’t read it from start to finish, but in bursts? Does the structure make sense? Premise: Will readers understand what you’re doing and why they should invest the time in reading? Order: Have you chosen an effective way to present the information? Even when narrating a
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Adding complexity to your writing does not make you seem smarter.
If you want people to think you’re brilliant, communicate intelligent thoughts effectively.
Your thinking voice doesn’t have to be your writing voice.
Readers shouldn’t have to travel exactly the same thought processes that you did. Do the work of smoothing the path for them.
We know how our brains got to the point of what we’re saying. We may not realize that other people’s brains, not starting in the same place, aren’t coming along with us.
Unless you’re publishing a journal, take the reader’s perspective during revision.
Many of these issues are simply artifacts of the way you think. That quirky sentence construction may reflect a creative, circuitous thought process.
When engaging outside editors or experts: Understand and communicate the type of editing you seek. Do you want developmental editing, which is welcome earlier in the process, or copyediting later on? Proofreading? Share the ideal reader, purpose, and attempted tone and style with the editor. The more the editor understands about what you’re trying to do, the better advice they can provide.
If you wait for perfection, nothing will ever be published.
world. Be patient at the start of the revision process and impatient by the end.
I wish I could tell you that when you find a perfect process that aligns with the way your brain works, everything goes smoothly from that point on. But as I mentioned already, I don’t write fiction.
Treat yourself as a client. We often put our own needs or wishes last, behind those of other people. This apparent selflessness may mask uncertainty; we’re not sure that committing time to writing makes any sense, so it's the first thing to fall off the schedule.
If you truly don’t have a spare moment, become a collector of ideas.
Even the casual comment from an acquaintance—“Why would you write a book on that subject?”—can trigger a descent into negative rumination.
Plan ahead and stockpile the positive. When a reader gives you a meaningful compliment, record it. File those comments away for the uncertain future.
Learn from the critics, but serve the fans.
Let actions speak louder than words. Write your 1,000 words, or two pages, or whatever your daily practice is. Let your behavior be your defense.
You will have bad days, when the work does not go well. When you cannot come up with a single decent idea or turn of phrase. When the interruptions rain down more heavily than an El Niño downpour.
If you can’t keep going, forgive yourself. If you are unable to write for a while, go back to taking notes or scribbling down ideas when they strike, and restart when you can.
Metacognition has the potential to change our behavior. If we understand the flawed shorthand abstractions, heuristics, or mental shortcuts we use to make decisions, we can improve those processes, inviting the rational mind to weigh in.
