I have to admit - I was never a fan of “the writing process.” I’d hammer out everything I wanted to say into a document and get a bit upset it wasn’t great the first time.
This wasn’t a novel feeling in the canon of human emotion, but a shared one among writers. Writing is a process - and there is Zen in the art of writing, as the great author Ray Bradbury once wrote.
I quickly realised that process, with one letter changed is progress, and began structuring my writing around a five-step writing process.
What are the five steps of the writing process?
According to me, they are:
Brainstorming
Research
Drafting
Revision
Proofing
Yours may look a little different - and that’s fine. But they should follow a logical order from generating an idea, researching it, writing the piece, and revising it.
Brainstorming Before Writing
Ideas are a dime a dozen. You can come up with about fifteen hare-brained schemes before lunchtime, all of them awful. (I do it all the time.) However you will need a vague idea about what you’re writing about before you set down and do it. Joel Saltzman in his excellent If You Can Talk You Can Write, wrote that you should write down almost everything that comes into your brain before you get to the next phase of writing - he calls this the crap, crap, crap, crap, GOLD method.
Chances are you’ve been in rooms where this has coalesced spontaneously. Once you’ve mined the gold from the crap, you can refine your idea by researching it. (This really is a lot like mining gold, isn’t it?)
Research and Writing
The very first and very mandatory subject I took for my Masters degree was called Research and Writing. This was the gateway to doing any sort of writing, be it for journalism, communications, or even fiction. Roy Peter Clark in his brilliant Help! For Writers book says that writer’s block is a furphy - it’s more that you don’t have enough information on hand to write anything meaningful.
Drafting Your Piece of Writing
Drafting is basically the act of getting words on to a page. In my process, if I’m writing a blog or a skyscraper piece of content, is to break up my piece into topic headings. This was auto-magically done for me thanks to this piece being called How To Use The Five-Step Writing Process For Your Content. However, in most non-fiction writing, the drafting process can be made easier by using the essay method or “painting the house” method:
Introducing your topic - why are we here? What am I going to talk about? Let’s say, why M&Ms are the superior movie snack.
The sub-topics or arguments - group these into discrete categories which will form paragraphs. In our essay, we could group these up into M&Ms are cheap; they’re tasty; they’re quiet; they don’t melt when you’re holding on to them.
Concluding your topic - what did we learn? Summarise what you talked about. This is why M&Ms are the best choice for sitting down and pigging out at the movies.
They don’t have to be perfect at this point - this is where revision comes in.
Revising Your Writing
Writing is an act of creative destruction. You will write a lot, but you will cut a lot. When clients ask me if “X is necessary” - the mere suggestion should be an invitation to cut it. Cut, cut, cut. Murder your darlings.
Conversely, this is where the L’esprit de l’escalier rears its head - the “staircase wit” where you think of a perfect retort or reply just as you’ve left the room. (The jerk store called, yada yada yada.)
Lucky for us, you can return to your piece and add the perfect argument (in your eyes) after the fact. Oh yes - you can smuggle M&Ms past the ushers! On closer reflection M&Ms aren’t that quiet after all - best cut that entirely.
Use this time to sculpt your piece into its strongest - not perfect - form.
Proofreading Your Writing
With your contents locked in and your sentences as good as they’re going to get, this is where you proofread. Not edit - we’ve already done the editing. Proofing is NOT the same as editing. All you’re doing here is checking for grammatical or spelling mistakes.
Print your piece out and read it backwards to “refresh” it in your mind - it’s likely you’ve glossed over some clangers after staring at it for hours on end. If possible, get a third party to weigh in (provided their spelling and grammar skills are equal or better than yours.)
What’s Next?
After you’ve completed the five step writing process - you’re on to the next piece! If that makes you weep with despair, you can always get a professional to help you out! I write copy and content for all purposes (except academic - do your own homework!) using a tried and true five-step writing process. Contact me below!