Prewriting Is The. Worst.

Writing is a fantastic skill for anyone to learn. It’s how we interact, communicate messages, ideas, theories, and much more to not just ourselves but also audiences of people. With every skill, however, it is necessary to practice to get better. As a former English major, I’m usually the one people turn to for help, especially in the creative writing field. Yet, for me, someone who’s been writing for a decade, there are several parts of the writing process that I have difficulties with.

The main issue I have when it comes to creating fiction is that prewriting (step one) is the hardest for me; it sucks creativity and dampers unique ideas because they’re not “logical,” causing writers to quit before they start. However, there are two methods that I use to push me forward through that phase.

The techniques I discovered that helped me best overcome this anxiety were free-writing, which generates a lot of information by writing non-stop. Free-writing allowed me to focus on my piece topics and write so quickly that I can’t worry about editing any of my ideas until the end. In addition, it allows me to filter out all of my thoughts without worrying about changing them at the exact moment.

I took the journalism approach to my writing as well. With the journalism approach, I was about to ask the big six questions when writing: Who?, What?, Where?, When?, Why?, How? Some examples of the questions I ask are who the protagonist is, the antagonists, and the primary problem between the two and more. Of course, you can request an assortment of other questions; it all depends on what kind of piece you’re writing, nonfiction or fiction, and the genre your work falls under. The journalist approach allows me to pick through all the junk and get down to the key facts that make my piece unique; this way, I can create practical and enjoyable work based on the solid development I’ve already gathered. However, the approaches I took to improve my pieces did reduce my anxiety by the end of the exercises.

In experimenting with both approaches, I found that free-writing helped the best. The journalism approach was a better fit for when I had multiple characters per piece. With the free-writing process, I was able to take ideas that bounce around in my head and throw them on paper before I lost them; this is one of my biggest problems when it comes to writing. Free-writing also allowed me to see these events in real-time, versus getting them stuck in my head and trying to crawl through the mud just to come to the end of that storyline/thought. The free-writing also helped get me out of jams whenever I got stuck in the middle of a plot point, and it even helped me decide what the best approaches were to the next point in the plot.

The journalism method was suitable when it came to having different perspectives in pieces. That really helped me sort out who was who versus just having many people with similar goals, thoughts, and feelings about the same issue at hand. However, it did defeat me when it came to coming up with creative ideas on my own-that method kills my creativity because it requires me to think in-depth versus just throwing the ideas down and changing them (like when I free-write).

It was evident to me, even though both methods are excellent when it comes to writing.

The free-writing process gives me, as a fiction writer who typically uses one character who tends to speak with themselves, versus the journalism method due to the versatility and the freedom I had to explore my ideas with other sub-ideas.