This morning, on one of the blogs I read regularly, I found this clip (which I’d seen before but still find amusing):
Do any of these processes look familiar??
On a more serious note, in his essay “A Way of Writing” the poet and teacher Wiliam Stafford writes:
“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.”
Ernest Hemingway claimed, “My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.”
Composition books often divide the writing process into the stages of
- prewriting (gathering up ideas by thinking, jotting notes, clustering, and so forth)
- drafting (from when a writer sits down to start putting down sentences and paragraphs)
- revising (literally “seeing the piece again” to consider focus, development, organization, style)
- proofreading (in which writer checks for “correctness: of usage, grammar, spelling)