Five Tips to Developing an Effective Writing Process

Whether you would like to believe or not, there’s a process to writing – which many freelance writers follow naturally. If you’re just getting started as a freelance writer, though, or if you always find it a struggle to produce an essay, short story or blog, I am convinced that if you follow the writing process it will help you incredibly.

I’m going to explain what each stage of the writing process involves, and I’ll offer some tips for each section that will help out if you’re still feeling stuck!

1. Pre-writing

Have you ever sat staring at a blank piece of paper or a blank document on your computer screen and was left scratching your head and found yourself wasting valuable time wondering what key to push first or what letter to put down first? You might have skipped the vital first stage of the writing process: pre-writing. This covers everything you do before starting your rough draft. As a minimum, pre-writing means coming up with an idea!

Ideas and Inspiration

Ideas are all around you. If you want to write but you don’t have any ideas, try:

• Using a writing prompt to get you started. (more about writing prompts in a later blog)
• Writing about incidents from your daily life, or childhood.
• Keeping a notebook of ideas – jotting down those thoughts that occur throughout the day. (more about journal keeping in a later blog)
• Creating a vivid character, and then writing about him/her.

I will also be writing a blog about gathering writing ideas at a later date. 

Tip: Once you have an idea, you need to expand on it. Don’t make the mistake of jumping straight into your writing – you’ll end up with a badly structured piece.

Building on Your Idea

These are a couple of popular methods you can use to manifest life to your idea:

• Free writing: Open a new document or start a new page, and write everything that comes into your head about your chosen topic. Don’t stop to edit, even if you make mistakes.
• Brainstorming: Write the idea or topic in the center of your page. Jot down ideas that arise from it – sub-topics or directions you could take with the article.

Once you’ve done one or both of these, you need to select what’s going into your first draft.

Planning and Structure

Some pieces of writing will require more planning than others. Typically, longer pieces and academic papers need a lot of thought at this stage.

First, decide which ideas you’ll use. During your free writing and brainstorming, you’ll have come up with lots of thoughts. Some belong in this piece of writing: others can be kept for another time.

Then, decide how to put those ideas in order. Try to have a logical progression. Sometimes, your topic will make this easy: in this blog, for instance, it made sense to take each step of the writing process in order.

2. Writing

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