The Writing Process: Create, Revise, Repeat

Whether you know it or not, any time you write anything, you’re following a process. That process may be invisible. It may also be haphazard. But it exists. Whether it’s the most efficient way of getting your work done is up to you. But what I’d like to offer is a possible process — a barebones outline on which you can hang whatever it is you’re interested in writing.

Writing can start with an idea — or the lack of one. Ideas are a penny a pound, or at least that’s what I’ve always thought. When my readers ask me, “Where do you get your ideas?” I’m always a little surprised, because to me there are too many great ideas floating around out there. It’s like being faced with a tree that has too much fruit on it: you cannot pick it all.

Here’s what I think happens. For me, ideas come from outside of myself — a phrase I hear, a scene I see, an article I read — and then, for whatever reason, some of them take hold inside me, become a part of my inner life. I think about them, I imagine things about them. And my sense is that if you’re an artist of any kind, once an idea has become part of your inner life, then you’re going to feel an impulse, some would say a compulsion, to express it via your art. Many people find it useful to keep a notebook or file in which they slip these ideas, these snippets of conversation, these images. However you do it…