The writing process: where to start?

It’s good to know very early on exactly why you are writing something.

One of the reasons that I love being a writing mentor is that I so enjoy seeing my mentees calm down about their professional and academic writing and start to take control of their own process. Facilitating this is such a satisfying combination of technical and psychological work.

Overwhelm

A common problem is usually overwhelm: too much content. Clients often tell me that because the content is so complex, they feel that the process must be too. The ‘I can’t do this’ voice and script start to dominate. This is so undermining and generates an awful vicious circle of negativity: repeatedly feeling and saying ‘I can’t’ will make it more likely that you can’t, or it will certainly ensure that the process is going to be very miserable.

But the overwhelm often comes from people starting to write too quickly. Because they have all this knowledge in their head, and because they have done so much reading and taken so many notes, and spent so much time thinking about it, and with the clock ticking, they feel they must surely be ready to start writing. So they start drafting. And it’s not a pleasant experience because they are writing themselves into more overwhelm. This is often because they don’t know exactly why they are writing something.

Clarity of intention

I ask them to put down their pens, or take their hands off their keyboards, and talk to me. I want to hear about their project. During our first exchange I help them get to the point where they can say exactly why they are writing this piece. What question is the paper going to answer? (If it isn’t overt, there is always an underlying question to be answered.) It is amazing that this can take a while, and it is often after a lot of drafting has already taken place.

But once they have nailed the purpose of their paper, and written it down in two or three sentences, they just feel so much better. They have their compass.