My Writing Process

On By Travis MillerIn writing

Anyone who makes art, writes, or designs over a long period of time develops a process.

As a creator learns new techniques, experiences setbacks and successes, they incorporate those lessons into their own particular process.

The following is my current process. I don’t always use it and not always in this order.

Writer’s block is for amateurs

Having a process is critical on the days I don’t feel like writing or I am struggling with the words. It gives me a reference. I look at where I am at in the process and do the next thing.

The work that day may not be good but I did work. That’s the important part. Being disciplined and consistently doing the work is more important than the quality of the outcome on a given day.

I’ll do better tomorrow, or the next day. If I write enough words, some of them will be worth sharing.

Generate ideas without judgement

My natural tendency is to judge every idea I have.

As soon as I write down an idea, my internal critic goes to work. He loves to tell me that my ideas are crap, have always been crap, and will always be crap. Why do you even bother? What a jerk.

I can’t let him judge the ideas prematurely.

There are good ideas bouncing around in my cranium. Most of the ideas are less good or bad and unworkable. It is hard to discern which is which until I get them out of my head.

There are many methods of generating ideas without judgement.

One of my favorites is to set a timer and make a list. The only rule is that I can’t stop writing until the timer goes off. I can come up with a lot of ideas in 15 minutes if I keep my pen moving.

Punctuation, spelling, grammer, coherence… none of that matters. Write as fast as possible without stopping. 

Since I don’t give myself time to judge the ideas, the internal resistance to generating them is lessened.

Winnowing

One idea can inspire months or years of work. One good idea can lead me to others.

I pick an idea that punches me in the gut. If I don’t feel something, you probably won’t either.

Sometimes, an idea has more emotional punch than I can handle. Those are usually the best ideas but they can be hard to write.

I have to sit with them for hours and hours. I have to live in the fear that this is going to get me kicked out of the tribe, that I don’t have the chops to write it well, that it will be so poorly received that nobody will ever want to read anything I write ever again. 

These mental distortions seem stupid when I say them outloud.

When I’m writing, those thoughts are constantly crawling down my spine to squeeze my heart.

Outlining

Once I pick an idea, I start outlining.

This can be the hardest part and where the most important work gets done. Someone watching from my door might think I’m just daydreaming. It can feel like I am fighting for my life.

I start at the end and work backwards. I ask myself a series of questions and write down the answers.

For an essay, some of my questions are:

  • What is the big idea?
  • Do I have a story that teaches the lesson?
  • Who is this for?
  • What do they fear?
  • What problems are they facing?

For an adventure or a fiction story:

  • What are the emotions I’m peddling?
  • What’s my genre?
  • What’s the big problem?
  • Who is this about?
  • What do they want?
  • Why can’t they have it?

I keep asking questions until the work takes shape.

Rough drafts

I prefer to write first drafts long hand. I write the first draft as quickly as I can. I try to write without editing. The internal critic wants his say here too.

The outline is a guide, not a precise blueprint.

This will sound odd if you’ve never experienced it. I don’t always know what I think about a topic until I start writing about it. Even after a making a robust outline, I have revelations as I write.

I don’t understand how it works, I just know that it does.

The more I get out of my head and onto the page, the more I have to work with later. I cannot edit what is not on the page.

Type it up

I set aside the first draft and start on something else. Ideally, I put it in the drawer for a week or longer without looking at it. Usually, it’s a day or two.

I return to the draft, read it, and type it up. I edit as I go.

More often than not, a new thought comes to me as I type this draft.

Remove the unnecessary

I remove anything that doesn’t need to be there. This is another moment when the emotional labor is rough.

It is hard to cut a line that seems clever. The clever lines are usually the least necessary lines.

It is not unusual for me to cut a blog post by half or more. I paste the cut material into a text file and come back to it later when I’m looking for an idea.

Revise

I read through again and revise. More questions…

  • Is this in the right sequence?
  • Is this clear?
  • How do I make this shorter?

I do many revisions. I may do an entire rewrite.

Refine

I read through the work line by line. I fix style issues, change words, clean up the flow. The substance doesn’t change, just the delivery.

I read the work out loud. Anything that doesn’t sound right to my ear gets reworked.

Detach from the outcome

I am a ruminator. When I finish, I worry.

I try to detach.

Is it good? Is it bad?

It doesn’t matter. The work is done. Start the next one.

You have the right to work, but for the work’s sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working. Never give way to laziness, either.

Perform every action with your heart fixed on the Supreme Lord. Renounce attachment to the fruits. Be even-tempered in success and failure: for it is this evenness of temper which is meant by yoga.

Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender. Seek refuge in the knowledge of Brahma. They who work selfishly for results are miserable.”

Bhagavad Gita

This is my practice

Some writing advice is crap.

You have to find your own process that fits your own personality, lifestyle, and tools.

I hope there’s something here that will work for you.

6 thoughts on “My Writing Process”

  1. Mitch G.'s avatar Mitch G.

    Sometimes even one’s crap can be sufficient. The band KISS, for example: Their goal was to release an album every year. So the majority of what they wrote made it onto an album. The stuff that didn’t (but was demo’d) made its way on to an expanded album version or some boxed set decades later. And most of it isn’t worth listening to. And yet it still made them rich. (And, yes, I’m a KISS fan. But I also have taste and a critical ear.)

    Liked by 1 person

      1. I’ll never forget the metaphor for this that I found in Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance. The main character makes his living writing magazine articles. He describes this as ‘shoveling cultural snow’.

        This is a term of approbation. The idea of being a genius revolutionary who creates what will be seen for ages as an exemplar is natural. Striving for greatness is good. However, by and large what’s needed is something else.

        There are many more snow-ploughers in the world than there are ice sculptors, and that’s a good thing.

        Like

  2. Dread Lord's avatar Dread Lord

    For writer’s block I have found one very simple exercise to be an almost immediate cure. I learned this technique from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. She calls it ‘Blasting away the blocks.’

    You take some lined paper and a pen, and you free-write everything you are worrying about in your work. It usually starts with the concrete problems you are facing in your project, characters, or a plot point, but then it quickly devolves into the large false beliefs you have about your talents. Something like:

    I have no original ideas. I’m a talentless hack. I don’t have what it takes to make it. Nobody cares about my ideas.

    It goes on and on like that. Write it all down. Once you’ve reached the bottom of the page, something strange happens. Instead of fighting those thoughts with rationalisations, you’ve just allowed them to exist, and to be honest they seem kind of ridiculous. You recognise that they are just worries, and usually the root of your block.

    Afterwards, I have been able to continue working with no problem, knowing that my worries will always try to trip me up. That’s what they’re there for.

    This has worked for me every time I’ve had trouble facing the empty page. Because my worries about failing, or writing poorly, only have power if I fail to recognise them for what they truly are. I’ve found this a very stoic process.

    Also, what you say about non judgement in generating ideas is very true. Staff writing rooms often start a session by asking everyone for a terrible idea as a sort of icebreaker.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. That’s very similar to a tool that the cognitive behavior therapists use. They have the client write down a problematic thought, identify the category of distorted thought it fits into and then write a reframing of that thought. I’ve used that method and found it very helpful.

      I’ve also heard of bands starting with bad ideas as part of their songwriting process.

      Liked by 1 person

  3. Pingback: On Writer’s Block: Part 2: What I Do About Writer’s Block – Grumpy Wizard

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