Basic Stages of the Writing Process

There are four basic stages of the writing process that lay the foundation for great creations.

Three stages are fundamental to building a concrete idea; the fourth stage is actually working with the process of the first three.

Whatever your writing environment and habits, they are simply the enabling conditions that allow you to enter and  complete your writing process.

They are the physical and psychological setting for the central action, which are the mental procedures you perform as you move through the stages of composition.

The writing process can be divided into three stages: planning, drafting, and revising.

Planning

This is the systematic process of developing your ideas and shaping them into your plot or general message. The planning process consists of a series of strategies designed to find and formulate information in writing.

When beginning a writing project, it is necessary to discover what is possible within the confines of the idea and explore a variety of alternative ways to think and write about each segment.

In other words, whenever ideas come to you, it is beneficial to consider all of them, however basic or unorthodox.

Drafting

Drafting is a procedure for executing a preliminary sketch. It is a series of strategies designed to organize and develop a sustained piece of writing. Once planning has enabled you to identify several subjects and gather information on those subjects from different perspectives, you need to select one subject, organize your information into meaningful clusters, and then discover the links that connect those clusters.

Revising

The procedure for improving a work in progress is called revising. This process is a series of strategies designed to reexamine and reevaluate the choices that have created a piece of writing.

After completing your preliminary draft, take a break from your text and decide whether to do a global revision (which is a complete recreation of the entire piece)--or to begin local revision (which is a concerted effort to perfect the smaller elements in your writing).

Planning, drafting, and revising your document make it possible to now work within the process. Writing is a complex mental activity that usually unfolds as a more flexible and "recursive" sequence of tasks. Foundational methods are therefore necessary.

Experienced writers seem to perform within the process in different ways. For instance, some spend an enormous amount of time planning every detail before writing a sentence; others prefer to dispense with planning to discover their direction in drafting or revising.

Each writer finds his own way and charts his own course. No one recipe applies to all. However, knowing of different methods is helpful, in terms of demonstrating creative freedoms.