If you are like most writers, your first hurdle is how to start writing. You may have cultivated the habit of journaling or writing in your diary, yet when it is time to write that book you have been dreaming about, you end up staring at the screen, or in a dramatic showcase of frustrated writing, your trash-can overflows with crumpled paper. But when does writing commence? Writing begins when you sit down and write.

IN BRAINSTORMING YOUR SUBJECT

As soon as you begin encoding letters, words, and phrases, you are already writing. Rarely will the codes you type be considered final sentences and expressions of your ideas. But whatever they are that you have initially penned, those are your starts. Those ‘brainstorms,’ are sparks of creative insights that may or may not find their place at all in the final document.

A common misconception about brainstorming is that it is a random formulation of subjects from a clash of many heads. But writing is the job of one single person at one set continuous time. The brainstorming is done by only one creative head who will inevitably talk to itself alone throughout the writing process. This means that the author-originator must be deliberate with a free and unencumbered brainstorming. If in the process they end up with more than three pages of nonsensical and unorganized thought, so be it. Stop crumpling the paper, but save the document with a date, and dating subsequent revisions as well, keep the initial drafts on file.

Brainstorming yield your first thoughts in writing. You may not yet be aware of your subject but are biased towards an opinion or viewpoint. You may not have yet established how you’re going to package your ideas, but are leaning toward a form. You may not be fully informed but eager to research and dig deeper into a topic. Whatever your leaning may be, brainstorming will light them up for you so you will find the way toward a vision for a project.    

IN GATHERING YOUR REFERENCES

Research is a fearsome word. The stereotypical impression is that of a scholar buried under a pile of paper, glasses falling off her face as she reads through pages with furrowed eyebrows. However, as a writer you need to seek out the relevant literature at the very start. You need related texts to capture the free fall of creative imagination. Research will give you a framework. It is a wisdom catcher that will bring your ideas together. Resulting citations will have made you check, suspect, or validate assumptions and presuppositions. You gain authority in the subject matter at hand.

IN JOURNALING YOUR EXPERIENCES

What about the process itself? Writing is a reflexive exercise. Once you sit down and write, you are very much aware of your process. How efficient is your method of writing? How disciplined? How relaxed? How egoistic? How sensitive? Often writing starts here as well, when you become self-aware. Do you take down notes on the go? Do you keep a notebook and change it only after you’ve filled it out entirely? Do you write down dialogues you hear as you commute? Do you keep a notepad of quotations?

Consult your journals, your letters, your diary, and even those back of receipts where you wrote down bullet points of wisdom. What is it that you always wrote about and why? How were you able to write in an unhurried pace or under a tense situation? Can you recall how you came up with one cohesive statement? Are you writing about personal desires using gut expressions? When you start writing, every process is a precious first note of how your text may eventually sing.

IN WRITING A FIRST DRAFT

You have reached a point when all that brainstormed ideas have narrowed into one united thought. Now is when you try to harmonize your concept by thinking about an audience. You need to ask at this stage, who will read what you have written and why? How will that reader not misunderstand? How will this writing resonate with that audience hearer?

Writing the first draft involves a hearer. There is always that ear of attention an author-originator will have to seduce through set, contemplative ways. That ear will hear because what the final draft is saying has aimed for it to listen. Deliberately, writing the final draft is a performance of careful attention to detail. The grammar, syntax and diction forming the major units of thoughts need exactness and fluency. Usually, the draft will, at this final form, exhibit the writing voice, or the style, or the angle, or beat. The final draft has made only one cohesive claim or perspective. Ambiguity is completely gone, and at least for that one target hearer and audience, a point has been made.