I teach secondary education and college composition. I work with students ranging from 7th grade to first-year students at community colleges. My life is writing. Similarly, I have a long history of writing. I was a journalist for nearly a decade, worked in the tech-comm field for a spell, and have published fiction in both professional publications and on my own blog. I have my process down pretty well and work to constantly evolve and improve.
What follows are a few suggestions from a college instructor.
Things to Consider
Trust the Writing Process
If you are a novice or a master writer, stick to the writing process. The writing process is meant to guide you through your entire text with consideration to its own recursive nature. That is to say, you can always go back through the writing process whenever you want. If you are saying, “Well, duh!” just keep in mind that there are a great many people who believe you can just sit down and hammer out your writing with little thought to brainstorming or prewriting. You really need the whole process for it to be effective.
Rewriting is Great Writing
Good writing is rewriting. This is sage advice, and it doesn’t come from me. It’s a pretty well-known fact. You can’t just sit down and write gold. You have to sit down and write garbage, and then spin that garbage into gold through the recursive nature of writing and by revising and editing until your piece is ready to be published. When you revise, you are looking for the “bigger picture” problems. When you edit, you look for the grammatical fixes. For me, and as said by my graduate advisor, I have bigger fish to fry than a split infinitive. Are the ideas there? Do they make sense? You can only get to a flawless text through trial and error.
Writing is Time Consuming
Writing projects take time, and it’s important to accept that they won’t be completed in a day. You have to remember that writing happens one day with prewriting and drafting. On another day, the next stage of writing happens, which includes revising and editing. Is this always true? No. Sometimes businesses forces writers to work at an alarming rate, and they churn out half-completed articles for websites all the time. I believe, and do take this with a grain of salt, but writing should be spread out so that you are not inundating yourself with too much work. It’s very easy to overlook accuracy, grammar, and logical coherence when you are trying to cram it all in one day. The advice typically given is this: sometimes you have to just walk a way for a while.
Work on Multiple Projects
One thing I notice from time to time is that writers keep themselves from engaging in more than one project. I think they believe their focus has to be on one story, article, or book at any given time. These days, I’m constantly working on books, short stories, blog posts, essays, etc. all in a given day. Ideas come to me from everywhere. I try to take as many notes as possible, and when I’m not working on one project, I am brainstorming and prewriting for another. Keep yourself busy.
Conclusion
There is a lot of mythology in writing. You have to be aware of what works for you and what doesn’t. I’ve been yelled at by many people who really hate being told that the writing process is as close to perfect as one can get (generally speaking) when it comes to the start and end of a project. That said, the other suggestions will benefit you as well. Pay special attention to revising and editing, and remember that it’s okay to walk away for a while. I mean, if you follow this advice, you’re just walking away into another project anyway. Now you’re writing full-time, and with all that practice, you’ll have your process down pat in no time.
