Write What Your Heart Desires

When I ask this question, I don’t only mean subject matter, but more the “how do we go about writing a story” type of thing.

Well, as I was looking for something to write, I came across some information on the writing process. It gave a little food for thought.

Have you ever considered that, in other subjects you build on what is learnt at each stage? For example – maths. Yes, we all have a basic knowledge of maths when we first start, but we learn each stage as we go along.

When it comes to writing, everything that you know at the end, you already know at the beginning. Think about it. When we start writing we need:

A subject – without a subject we won’t have a story.

Then, once we have a subject we need a word count. The story has to be a manageable size. But then, those people who have a particular age group that they enjoy writing for, will know beforehand what the word count would be.

With this sorted we need to know what material will go into the story. A fiction story needs content that fits the story. While a non-fiction story needs information that will cover the chosen subject.

Talking about material. Once we have the required material, we need to put it in the correct order. As I write this, it takes me back to the question “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” In other words, a car wouldn’t come before the design & planning stages.

So, now that we’ve got that straight, there are three principle stages to the writing process:

1) Prewriting, the starting block – the plans or beginning stages of the story to be written.

2) Writing, the middle – putting those plans and beginnings on paper to develop that story or article.

3) The revision, the end (of the actual writing process) – making those, often very difficult, changes to that masterpiece.

But this is not a strict, “have to stick to it” rule. As the writing process progresses, some of these processes will overlap. There will be things that need moving, things that need leaving out. In many cases the revision process starts at the beginning.

So, as I said at the start of this post, when writing a story we need to know the how’s why’s and wherefore’s before we begin.

Happy writing!