The Writer's Options (3-14)

Although all writer's have their own style, most utilize the same composing process - prewriting, drafting, and rewriting. Many authors will move back and forth between these steps as they write, and they'll even repeat steps. Prewriting means to plan and think before you begin drafting, drafting is to get your writing down on paper, and rewriting is to modify your written draft. It is important to use these steps in your own writing process.

Listing, focused free writing, and the reporter's formula. Three solutions to your writer's block. It's difficult to know where to begin when you are first starting a piece of writing, so it's helpful to have a starting point. List ideas of things you'd like to write about, and list information about those things. It will help you brainstorm and give you many writing options to choose from. Focused free writing is to write nonstop for a certain period of time. It's possible that a majority of it won't be helpful, but parts of it will spark new ideas, and get you started on something much bigger. The reporter's formula is to ask questions used by newspaper reporters, "who, what, where, when, why, how?" Ask yourself these questions to generate ideas for your writing and to learn new information about it.

Once you decide who you're writing for and the reason you're writing, you'll be able to determine which main idea you want to focus on. Once you focus on one main idea, everything else becomes "blurred out" in a sense, so it's important to pick an idea relevant to the purpose of your writing.