The Five Stages Of Writing

I thought I’d give you a sneak preview of just one part of the workshop in June.Many of people’s problems with writing happen because they don’t distinguish between the different stages in a writing project.

Muddling those stages can slow you down or even worse stop you completely.  In the workshop I’ll be helping people work out the different mindsets you need for each stage.

Let’s look at the stages:

1. Research:

One of the unmovable bricks in my writing house is research.  Now this isn’t always popular with clients or writers come to that. But the more I work with clients, the more I realise that doing research about your project is key to smoothing the writing process.

Where and how you research depends on your project, your target audience and your understanding of your market.

2. Writing:

This is the fun stage.  The stage where you can let your creativity run riot and not censor it.  Of course you have to start and that’s a problem many people I meet tell me about. 

Fear of the blank page.  Even professional writers have it sometimes.  The difference between the professionals and the rest, is that they know how to beat it into submission!

3. Pause:

Can this be said to be a stage?  Yes I believe that you have to factor in a time when you’ve reached the end of a chapter, a section or the whole book and you stop. 

Rather than it being simply a time between the bits or the stages, you can learn how to use it to give yourself a flying start with the next stage.

4. Editing:

Ah editing!  Writers often hate this stage because they can’t bear to read over what they’ve written. 

I often think about what the sculptor Michaelangelo said about sculpting.  That it was a case of allowing the figure to emerge from a block of marble.

In the same way when you edit you’re allowing the book to emerge from the words you’ve written.

As always, when you know how to approach editing then it can be a much easier and more fun stage.

5. Reviewing:

And a scary stage for writers when you have to show other people what you’ve written.

But as you’d expect me to say by now, there are ways you can tackle this stage which help reduce the strain on your nervous system.

That’s it in a nutshell.  Doesn’t mean you don’t have to put some work in, but using this kind of structure helps reduce the time and gives you a process to work through.

Happy writing!