The Writing Process

I have got to get back into the habit of blogging earlier in the day. At a certain point, my brain gets so tired that I can't focus on the Spirit. While I was reviewing my day, scrolling down Facebook, and reading articles on LDS.org, I'm sure I saw at least a dozen blogworthy thoughts, but I can't really think about what to say for any of them - not unless I'm prepared to spend a significant amount of time brainstorming and organizing unique thoughts with what's left of my cognitive ability. I'm sure I could blog about the folly of procrastination (again) or about how our ability to follow the Spirit is numbed by the same things that numb our brains, but that would require more thought than I think I'm currently capable of. So instead, I'll write about something that I know well enough that I can write about it without having to think too much, and hope I can find a spiritual application for it by the time I'm done.

The writing process is, applying only the barest essentials, a simple one. All a person has to do is sit down at a desk or table and start putting words on a paper or computer screen. That is, essentially, what I'm doing right now. But the literal act of writing words, the "drafting" of a book, essay, or blog post, is optimally only one of five steps within a greater writing process.

The first step, which is almost always done mentally, but is better done on paper, is prewriting. This often involves brainstorming, and basically means coming up with ideas for what to write about. This first step is the one on which I most frequently get stuck while blogging. One method of prewriting involves writing down anything you can think of that might match the topic at hand. For example, I could have opened a word document and started writing a list of the things I did and experienced today. If any one of those things seemed even remotely blogworthy, I could have narrowed my focus and made a list of thoughts that correspond with that experience. This will generate long lists of ideas - most of which won't be used in the actual paper, but that's okay. The purpose of this step is to generate as much material for your paper as possible, even if you can't use all of it.

The second step is to organize your thoughts. Now that you have a good amount of ideas, you can start to be picky and choose only the best ideas to use in your paper. This is also the step in which you start to put your thoughts in order. Thankfully for me, this step was already done for me when I decided to write about the writing process. Since the steps are chronological, remembering the steps gives me an outline I can use while writing about the writing process. For other topics, forming an outline can be trickier. It's not uncommon for people to skip this step and let their ideas fall wherever they may, but better papers are made by specifically choosing what order to present your information in.

The third and central step is drafting, the actual writing of the paper. Generally, you'll want to follow the outline you made in the previous step while you draft your paper, but other than that, don't worry too much about your paper's organization. The idea of this step is simply to write. Turning what you've written into something you can turn in for grading is the job of the next two steps.

The penultimate step is revising. In this step, you compare what you've written against what you were supposed to have written and with your outline. It's not likely to match perfectly. There may be whole sections of your draft that need cutting out or building up. Maybe you need to make subtle changes throughout the draft to create the feel that your paper is going for. For example, if I were feeling ambitious, I could look up the scripture about the parable about the man who wanted to build a tower, and work that scripture into the paragraph about one of the first two steps, explaining the wisdom of planning something before actually doing it. Actually, that may be blogworthy on its own. I should make myself a note to blog about that later. Another revision I should make would be to delete this entire sentence, along with the previous two.

The fifth and final step is editing. In this last step, you proofread your paper and check it for errors. If you find any small errors, you correct them. If you find any big errors, you wonder to yourself why you didn't catch them while you were revising, and then you correct them. The editing step deals mostly with what we call "sentence-level" or "local" issues, such as misspellings and grammatical errors, whereas the revising step focussed on "global" issues, such as whether or not your paper fits the assignment you were given and presents information clearly. I try to edit as I go, and experts disagree on whether or not that's a wise practice. It saves you time later and helps you exercise proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation, but it can also slow down a person's drafting step, and can even lead to writer's block if correcting an error derails your train of thought. Whether you edit while you write or not, so should always go back and check for errors after you finish writing a paper but before you submit it for a grade.

So, good writing involves much more than just doing the actual writing. There are steps to plan and prepare, to make sure you write the right stuff, and there are steps to revise and edit your work, to make sure you wrote the right stuff and wrote it right. There are at least two blogworthy thoughts I could pull out of that, one about preparing to take the proper course of action, and one about evaluating our choices after we've made them. Since I already plan on blogging about planning ahead later, I think I'll briefly blog about the second thought first.

In life, we can't really go back and edit the past. We can't revise what we've said to others after we've said it. I can't go back and replace whatever I did earlier this evening with writing a better blog post than this one. But we can do two other things instead. We can repent of past mistakes, and we can learn  from them for the future. Earlier today, I made the decision to put off blogging until now. In hindsight, that was a bad decision, and while I can't change my decision now, I can change my priorities for the future. Tomorrow, time permitting, I'll blog in the afternoon. If I can't do that, I'll try to blog before I leave for Scouts. And if I can't do that, I'm sorry, but my blog post will be late again tomorrow. But I will try to think of blogworthy topics throughout the day tomorrow (I know I've got the planning ahead idea, but I think I'll save that for later). I may even find something blogworthy in the next General Conference talk. I'll have to watch it again to be sure (reading it just hasn't been doing it for me). So at least, by the time I sit down to draft my next blog post, I'll have already done the first two steps in the process of writing it. Revision and editing will be done afterward, if both time and mental capacity remain when the third, most essential step is completed.