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The Writing Process | 5 Steps with Examples & Tips

Published on April 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on December 8, 2023.

Good academic writing requires effective planning, drafting, and revision.

The writing process looks different for everyone, but there are five basic steps that will help you structure your time when writing any kind of text.

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Table of contents

Step 1: prewriting, step 2: planning and outlining, step 3: writing a first draft, step 4: redrafting and revising, step 5: editing and proofreading, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about the writing process.

Before you start writing, you need to decide exactly what you’ll write about and do the necessary research.

Coming up with a topic

If you have to come up with your own topic for an assignment, think of what you’ve covered in class— is there a particular area that intrigued, interested, or even confused you? Topics that left you with additional questions are perfect, as these are questions you can explore in your writing.

The scope depends on what type of text you’re writing—for example, an essay or a research paper will be less in-depth than a dissertation topic . Don’t pick anything too ambitious to cover within the word count, or too limited for you to find much to say.

Narrow down your idea to a specific argument or question. For example, an appropriate topic for an essay might be narrowed down like this:

Doing the research

Once you know your topic, it’s time to search for relevant sources and gather the information you need. This process varies according to your field of study and the scope of the assignment. It might involve:

• Searching for primary and secondary sources .
• Reading the relevant texts closely (e.g. for literary analysis ).
• Collecting data using relevant research methods (e.g. experiments , interviews or surveys )

From a writing perspective, the important thing is to take plenty of notes while you do the research. Keep track of the titles, authors, publication dates, and relevant quotations from your sources; the data you gathered; and your initial analysis or interpretation of the questions you’re addressing.

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Especially in academic writing , it’s important to use a logical structure to convey information effectively. It’s far better to plan this out in advance than to try to work out your structure once you’ve already begun writing.

Creating an essay outline is a useful way to plan out your structure before you start writing. This should help you work out the main ideas you want to focus on and how you’ll organize them. The outline doesn’t have to be final—it’s okay if your structure changes throughout the writing process.

Use bullet points or numbering to make your structure clear at a glance. Even for a short text that won’t use headings, it’s useful to summarize what you’ll discuss in each paragraph.

An outline for a literary analysis essay might look something like this:

• Describe the theatricality of Austen’s works
• Outline the role theater plays in Mansfield Park
• Introduce the research question: How does Austen use theater to express the characters’ morality in Mansfield Park ?
• Discuss Austen’s depiction of the performance at the end of the first volume
• Discuss how Sir Bertram reacts to the acting scheme
• Introduce Austen’s use of stage direction–like details during dialogue
• Explore how these are deployed to show the characters’ self-absorption
• Discuss Austen’s description of Maria and Julia’s relationship as polite but affectionless
• Compare Mrs. Norris’s self-conceit as charitable despite her idleness
• Summarize the three themes: The acting scheme, stage directions, and the performance of morals
• Answer the research question
• Indicate areas for further study

Once you have a clear idea of your structure, it’s time to produce a full first draft.

This process can be quite non-linear. For example, it’s reasonable to begin writing with the main body of the text, saving the introduction for later once you have a clearer idea of the text you’re introducing.

To give structure to your writing, use your outline as a framework. Make sure that each paragraph has a clear central focus that relates to your overall argument.

Hover over the parts of the example, from a literary analysis essay on Mansfield Park , to see how a paragraph is constructed.

The character of Mrs. Norris provides another example of the performance of morals in Mansfield Park . Early in the novel, she is described in scathing terms as one who knows “how to dictate liberality to others: but her love of money was equal to her love of directing” (p. 7). This hypocrisy does not interfere with her self-conceit as “the most liberal-minded sister and aunt in the world” (p. 7). Mrs. Norris is strongly concerned with appearing charitable, but unwilling to make any personal sacrifices to accomplish this. Instead, she stage-manages the charitable actions of others, never acknowledging that her schemes do not put her own time or money on the line. In this way, Austen again shows us a character whose morally upright behavior is fundamentally a performance—for whom the goal of doing good is less important than the goal of seeming good.

When you move onto a different topic, start a new paragraph. Use appropriate transition words and phrases to show the connections between your ideas.

The goal at this stage is to get a draft completed, not to make everything perfect as you go along. Once you have a full draft in front of you, you’ll have a clearer idea of where improvement is needed.

Give yourself a first draft deadline that leaves you a reasonable length of time to revise, edit, and proofread before the final deadline. For a longer text like a dissertation, you and your supervisor might agree on deadlines for individual chapters.

Now it’s time to look critically at your first draft and find potential areas for improvement. Redrafting means substantially adding or removing content, while revising involves making changes to structure and reformulating arguments.

Evaluating the first draft

It can be difficult to look objectively at your own writing. Your perspective might be positively or negatively biased—especially if you try to assess your work shortly after finishing it.

It’s best to leave your work alone for at least a day or two after completing the first draft. Come back after a break to evaluate it with fresh eyes; you’ll spot things you wouldn’t have otherwise.

When evaluating your writing at this stage, you’re mainly looking for larger issues such as changes to your arguments or structure. Starting with bigger concerns saves you time—there’s no point perfecting the grammar of something you end up cutting out anyway.

Right now, you’re looking for:

• Arguments that are unclear or illogical.
• Areas where information would be better presented in a different order.
• Passages where additional information or explanation is needed.
• Passages that are irrelevant to your overall argument.

For example, in our paper on Mansfield Park , we might realize the argument would be stronger with more direct consideration of the protagonist Fanny Price, and decide to try to find space for this in paragraph IV.

For some assignments, you’ll receive feedback on your first draft from a supervisor or peer. Be sure to pay close attention to what they tell you, as their advice will usually give you a clearer sense of which aspects of your text need improvement.

Redrafting and revising

Once you’ve decided where changes are needed, make the big changes first, as these are likely to have knock-on effects on the rest. Depending on what your text needs, this step might involve:

• Making changes to your overall argument.
• Reordering the text.
• Cutting parts of the text.
• Adding new text.

You can go back and forth between writing, redrafting and revising several times until you have a final draft that you’re happy with.

Think about what changes you can realistically accomplish in the time you have. If you are running low on time, you don’t want to leave your text in a messy state halfway through redrafting, so make sure to prioritize the most important changes.

Editing focuses on local concerns like clarity and sentence structure. Proofreading involves reading the text closely to remove typos and ensure stylistic consistency. You can check all your drafts and texts in minutes with an AI proofreader .

Editing for grammar and clarity

When editing, you want to ensure your text is clear, concise, and grammatically correct. You’re looking out for:

• Grammatical errors.
• Ambiguous phrasings.
• Redundancy and repetition .

In your initial draft, it’s common to end up with a lot of sentences that are poorly formulated. Look critically at where your meaning could be conveyed in a more effective way or in fewer words, and watch out for common sentence structure mistakes like run-on sentences and sentence fragments:

• Austen’s style is frequently humorous, her characters are often described as “witty.” Although this is less true of Mansfield Park .
• Austen’s style is frequently humorous. Her characters are often described as “witty,” although this is less true of Mansfield Park .

To make your sentences run smoothly, you can always use a paraphrasing tool to rewrite them in a clearer way.

Proofreading for small mistakes and typos

When proofreading, first look out for typos in your text:

• Spelling errors.
• Missing words.
• Confused word choices .
• Punctuation errors .
• Missing or excess spaces.

Use a grammar checker , but be sure to do another manual check after. Read through your text line by line, watching out for problem areas highlighted by the software but also for any other issues it might have missed.

For example, in the following phrase we notice several errors:

• Mary Crawfords character is a complicate one and her relationships with Fanny and Edmund undergoes several transformations through out the novel.
• Mary Crawford’s character is a complicated one, and her relationships with both Fanny and Edmund undergo several transformations throughout the novel.

Proofreading for stylistic consistency

There are several issues in academic writing where you can choose between multiple different standards. For example:

• Whether you use the serial comma .
• Whether you use American or British spellings and punctuation (you can use a punctuation checker for this).
• Where you use numerals vs. words for numbers.
• How you capitalize your titles and headings.

Unless you’re given specific guidance on these issues, it’s your choice which standards you follow. The important thing is to consistently follow one standard for each issue. For example, don’t use a mixture of American and British spellings in your paper.

Additionally, you will probably be provided with specific guidelines for issues related to format (how your text is presented on the page) and citations (how you acknowledge your sources). Always follow these instructions carefully.

If you want to know more about AI for academic writing, AI tools, or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy
• Deep learning
• Generative AI
• Machine learning
• Reinforcement learning
• Supervised vs. unsupervised learning

 (AI) Tools

• Grammar Checker
• Paraphrasing Tool
• Text Summarizer
• AI Detector
• Plagiarism Checker
• Citation Generator

Revising, proofreading, and editing are different stages of the writing process .

• Revising is making structural and logical changes to your text—reformulating arguments and reordering information.
• Editing refers to making more local changes to things like sentence structure and phrasing to make sure your meaning is conveyed clearly and concisely.
• Proofreading involves looking at the text closely, line by line, to spot any typos and issues with consistency and correct them.

Whether you’re publishing a blog, submitting a research paper , or even just writing an important email, there are a few techniques you can use to make sure it’s error-free:

• Take a break : Set your work aside for at least a few hours so that you can look at it with fresh eyes.
• Proofread a printout : Staring at a screen for too long can cause fatigue – sit down with a pen and paper to check the final version.
• Use digital shortcuts : Take note of any recurring mistakes (for example, misspelling a particular word, switching between US and UK English , or inconsistently capitalizing a term), and use Find and Replace to fix it throughout the document.

If you want to be confident that an important text is error-free, it might be worth choosing a professional proofreading service instead.

If you’ve gone over the word limit set for your assignment, shorten your sentences and cut repetition and redundancy during the editing process. If you use a lot of long quotes , consider shortening them to just the essentials.

If you need to remove a lot of words, you may have to cut certain passages. Remember that everything in the text should be there to support your argument; look for any information that’s not essential to your point and remove it.

To make this process easier and faster, you can use a paraphrasing tool . With this tool, you can rewrite your text to make it simpler and shorter. If that’s not enough, you can copy-paste your paraphrased text into the summarizer . This tool will distill your text to its core message.

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Do You Know The 7 Steps Of The Writing Process?

How much do you know about the different stages of the writing process? Even if you’ve been writing for years, your understanding of the processes of writing may be limited to writing, editing, and publishing. 

It’s not your fault. Much of the writing instruction in school and online focus most heavily on those three critical steps. 

Important as they are, though, there’s more to creating a successful book than those three. And as a writer, you need to know.   

The 7 Steps of the Writing Process

Read on to familiarize yourself with the seven writing process steps most writers go through — at least to some extent. The more you know each step and its importance, the more you can do it justice before moving on to the next. 

1. Planning or Prewriting

This is probably the most fun part of the writing process. Here’s where an idea leads to a brainstorm, which leads to an outline (or something like it). 

Whether you’re a plotter, a pantser, or something in between, every writer has some idea of what they want to accomplish with their writing. This is the goal you want the final draft to meet. 

With both fiction and nonfiction , every author needs to identify two things for each writing project: 

• Intended audience = “For whom am I writing this?”
• Chosen purpose = “What do I want this piece of writing to accomplish?”

In other words, you start with the endpoint in mind. You look at your writing project the way your audience would. And you keep its purpose foremost at every step. 

From planning, we move to the next fun stage. 

2. Drafting (or Writing the First Draft)

There’s a reason we don’t just call this the “rough draft,” anymore. Every first draft is rough. And you’ll probably have more than one rough draft before you’re ready to publish. 

For your first draft, you’ll be freewriting your way from beginning to end, drawing from your outline, or a list of main plot points, depending on your particular process. 

To get to the finish line for this first draft, it helps to set word count goals for each day or each week and to set a deadline based on those word counts and an approximate idea of how long this writing project should be. 

Seeing that deadline on your calendar can help keep you motivated to meet your daily and weekly targets. It also helps to reserve a specific time of day for writing. 

Another useful tool is a Pomodoro timer, which you can set for 20-25 minute bursts with short breaks between them — until you reach your word count for the day. 

3. Sharing Your First Draft

Once you’ve finished your first draft, it’s time to take a break from it. The next time you sit down to read through it, you’ll be more objective than you would be right after typing “The End” or logging the final word count. 

It’s also time to let others see your baby, so they can provide feedback on what they like and what isn’t working for them.

You can find willing readers in a variety of places: 

• Social media groups for writers
• Social media groups for readers of a particular genre
• Your email list (if you have one)
• Local and online writing groups and forums

This is where you’ll get a sense of whether your first draft is fulfilling its original purpose and whether it’s likely to appeal to its intended audience. 

You’ll also get some feedback on whether you use certain words too often, as well as whether your writing is clear and enjoyable to read. 

4. Evaluating Your Draft

Here’s where you do a full evaluation of your first draft, taking into account the feedback you’ve received, as well as what you’re noticing as you read through it. You’ll mark any mistakes with grammar or mechanics. 

And you’ll look for the answer to important questions: 

• Is this piece of writing effective/ Does it fulfill its purpose?
• Do my readers like my main character? (Fiction)
• Does the story make sense and satisfy the reader? (Fiction)
• Does it answer the questions presented at the beginning? ( Nonfiction )
• Is it written in a way the intended audience can understand and enjoy?

Once you’ve thoroughly evaluated your work, you can move on to the revision stage and create the next draft. 

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5. Revising Your Content

Revising and editing get mixed up a lot, but they’re not the same thing. 

With revising, you’re making changes to the content based on the feedback you’ve received and on your own evaluation of the previous draft. 

• To correct structural problems in your book or story
• To find loose ends and tie them up (Fiction)
• To correct unhelpful deviations from genre norms (Fiction)
• To add or remove content to improve flow and/or usefulness

You revise your draft to create a new one that comes closer to achieving your original goals for it. Your newest revision is your newest draft. 

If you’re hiring a professional editor for the next step, you’ll likely be doing more revision after they’ve provided their own feedback on the draft you send them. 

Editing is about eliminating errors in your (revised) content that can affect its accuracy, clarity, and readability.

By the time editing is done, your writing should be free of the following: 

• Grammatical errors
• Punctuation/mechanical and spelling errors
• Misquoted content
• Missing (necessary) citations and source info
• Factual errors
• Awkward phrasing
• Unnecessary repetition

Good editing makes your work easier and more enjoyable to read. A well-edited book is less likely to get negative reviews titled, “Needs editing.” And when it comes to books, it’s best to go beyond self-editing and find a skilled professional. 

A competent editor will be more objective about your work and is more likely to catch mistakes you don’t see because your eyes have learned to compensate for them. 

7. Publishing Your Final Product

Here’s where you take your final draft — the final product of all the previous steps — and prepare it for publication. 

Not only will it need to be formatted (for ebook, print, and audiobook), but you’ll also need a cover that will appeal to your intended audience as much as your content will. 

Whether you budget for these things or not depends on the path you choose to publish your book: 

• Traditional Publishing — where the publishing house provides editing, formatting, and cover design, as well as some marketing
• Self-Publishing — where you contract with professionals and pay for editing, formatting, and cover design. 
• Self-Publishing with a Publishing Company — where you pay the company to provide editing, formatting, and cover design using their in-house professionals.

And once your book is live and ready to buy, it’s time to make it more visible to your intended audience. Otherwise, it would fail in its purpose, too. 

Are you ready to begin 7 steps of the writing process?

Now that you’re familiar with the writing process examples in this post, how do you envision your own process?

While it should include the seven steps described here, it’ll also include personal preferences of your own — like the following: 

• Writing music and other ambient details
• Writing schedule
• Word count targets and time frames

The more you learn about the finer details of the writing process, the more likely you are to create content your readers will love. And the more likely they are to find it. 

Wherever you are in the process, our goal here is to provide content that will help you make the most of it. 

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Resources for Writers: The Writing Process

Writing is a process that involves at least four distinct steps: prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing. It is known as a recursive process. While you are revising, you might have to return to the prewriting step to develop and expand your ideas.

• Prewriting is anything you do before you write a draft of your document. It includes thinking, taking notes, talking to others, brainstorming, outlining, and gathering information (e.g., interviewing people, researching in the library, assessing data).
• Although prewriting is the first activity you engage in, generating ideas is an activity that occurs throughout the writing process.
• Drafting occurs when you put your ideas into sentences and paragraphs. Here you concentrate upon explaining and supporting your ideas fully. Here you also begin to connect your ideas. Regardless of how much thinking and planning you do, the process of putting your ideas in words changes them; often the very words you select evoke additional ideas or implications.
• Don’t pay attention to such things as spelling at this stage.
• This draft tends to be writer-centered: it is you telling yourself what you know and think about the topic.
• Revision is the key to effective documents. Here you think more deeply about your readers’ needs and expectations. The document becomes reader-centered. How much support will each idea need to convince your readers? Which terms should be defined for these particular readers? Is your organization effective? Do readers need to know X before they can understand Y?
• At this stage you also refine your prose, making each sentence as concise and accurate as possible. Make connections between ideas explicit and clear.
• Check for such things as grammar, mechanics, and spelling. The last thing you should do before printing your document is to spell check it.
• Don’t edit your writing until the other steps in the writing process are complete.

The Writing Process

Making expository writing less stressful, more efficient, and more enlightening, search form, you are here, what is a writing process.

“Writing is easy. You just open your veins and bleed.”  — Red Smith, Sportswriter

As you might expect, process writing means approaching a writing task according to a formalized series of concrete, discrete steps.  Although different versions of the writing process can be found—some with as few as three steps or phases, others with as many as eight—they generally move from a writer-oriented phase of pre-writing through drafting to reader-oriented revising and editing.  I generally find that the one I will present below, comprising five steps, is specific enough to make the important steps separate and yet not so complex as to be daunting.

Why even use a formal writing process, though?  What can it offer you that the kind of informal processes people typically use don't? Continue.

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The Writing Process

The writing process is something that no two people do the same way. There is no "right way" or "wrong way" to write. It can be a very messy and fluid process, and the following is only a representation of commonly used steps. Remember you can come to the Writing Center for assistance at any stage in this process. 

Steps of the Writing Process

Step 1: Prewriting

Think and Decide

• Make sure you understand your assignment. See  Research Papers  or  Essays
• Decide on a topic to write about. See   Prewriting Strategies  and  Narrow your Topic
• Consider who will read your work. See  Audience and Voice
• Brainstorm ideas about the subject and how those ideas can be organized. Make an outline. See  Outlines

Step 2: Research (if needed) 

• List places where you can find information.
• Do your research. See the many KU Libraries resources and helpful guides
• Evaluate your sources. See  Evaluating Sources  and  Primary vs. Secondary Sources
• Make an outline to help organize your research. See  Outlines

Step 3: Drafting

• Write sentences and paragraphs even if they are not perfect.
• Create a thesis statement with your main idea. See  Thesis Statements
• Put the information you researched into your essay accurately without plagiarizing. Remember to include both in-text citations and a bibliographic page. See  Incorporating References and Paraphrase and Summary  
• Read what you have written and judge if it says what you mean. Write some more.
• Read it again.
• Write some more.
• Write until you have said everything you want to say about the topic.

Step 4: Revising

Make it Better

• Read what you have written again. See  Revising Content  and  Revising Organization
• Rearrange words, sentences, or paragraphs into a clear and logical order. 
• Take out or add parts.
• Do more research if you think you should.
• Replace overused or unclear words.
• Read your writing aloud to be sure it flows smoothly. Add transitions.

Step 5: Editing and Proofreading

Make it Correct

• Be sure all sentences are complete. See  Editing and Proofreading
• Correct spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.
• Change words that are not used correctly or are unclear.
• APA Formatting
• Chicago Style Formatting
• MLA Formatting  
• Have someone else check your work.

The Writing Process: A Seven-Step Approach for Every Writer

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Main Writing Process Takeaways:

• Writing process refers to a series of steps that a writer must follow to complete a piece of writing.
• Having a  writing process  is essential to produce a wide range of content.
• Breaking down your text into different stages could ultimately improve content quality.
• A writing process or method includes the following stages: planning, drafting, sharing, evaluating, revising, editing, and publishing.
• The prewriting stage is the most critical stage of the writing process .

We all follow a writing process when creating an article or any written content. In most cases, this process becomes a routine that comes naturally rather than a step-by-step guide.

However, following a step-by-step writing process can come in handy, especially when dealing with challenging pieces. In this post, we will discuss the seven-stage writing method that you can use for writing high quality content.

What is the Writing Process?

Writing process refers to a series of steps that you must follow in order for you to complete a piece of writing . Writers may have different writing methods , but the writing stages are essentially the same. These stages break writing into manageable pieces from planning, drafting, and sharing to revising, editing, and publishing. That way, the task seems less laborious.

The primary strength of the writing process is its usefulness in producing a wide range of content. Whether you’re an academic writer, blogger , or screenwriter , it helps you write better, easier, and faster.

Read More: The Best Copywriting Courses For Beginners

Why is the writing process important.

Having a writing process will help you break your writing tasks into manageable parts, making the work less intimidating. As a result, you’re less likely to experience writer’s block. It could also aid in reducing the anxiety and stress that comes with writing. Also, breaking down your writing work into different stages could ultimately improve content quality.

It will allow you to focus on your piece. That way, you can tailor your content to address the specific needs of your target audience.

We could think of writing in terms of merely producing materials for readers to enjoy. But there’s more to the story.

With the right approach, writers usually undergo three stages — thinking, learning, and discovery — to produce excellent pieces. And such authentic writing usually makes lifelong learners and versatile writers.

Writers must always follow a writing process to be efficient and more productive.

It does not matter whether you are writing a thesis, academic report , research paper , essay, or blog content. The more organize your ideas are when you present them in text, the more you will be able to connect with your readers.

What are the 7 Steps of the Writing Process?

The EEF’s “ Improving Literacy in Key Stage 2 ” guidance report broke down the writing process into seven stages. This includes the planning , drafting, sharing, evaluating, revising, editing, and publishing stages. As writers become adept in these stages, they can quickly move back and forth, revising their text along the way. In other words, writing is not a linear process.

1. Planning or Prewriting

The planning or prewriting stage involves brainstorming, which takes into account your writing purpose and goal. It’s also the stage to connect your ideas using graphic organizers. The prewriting stage is when you ask the following questions:

• What will I write?
• What is the intended purpose of the writing?
• Who is the audience for your writing?

You need to do intent research to better understand what your target readers need. For instance, if you are writing for the web, you can take advantage of Google-Related Questions to know what the people are searching for online in relation to your topic.

Answering these questions ensures that you start your writing with the end in mind. Furthermore, you’ll be able to see your writing project through your audience’s eyes.

2. Create Your First Draft

Before your content is ready for publishing, you must have created a couple of drafts.

Thanks to the drafting process, you can write freely from the beginning to the end. What’s more, it provides a way to quickly draw from your outline or list of main plot points — depending on your writing process.

You could also use these stages to establish word count goals to get a rough idea of the project duration. This is especially important for creative writers such as novelists.

3. Share Your First Draft

After completing the first draft, it’s time to take a break and share the text with others.

While it may sound a bit scary at first, the feedback will help you evaluate elements of your writing. These include the composition, structure, and overall effectiveness.

Consider sharing your first draft in the following places:

• Your email list — if you have one
• Online writing groups and forums
• Social media groups for writers
• Social media group for a specific genre

In the end, you’ll know whether your first draft fulfills the intended purpose and appeal to your audience. The feedback also tells you if your writing is clear, enjoyable, and easy to read.

4. Evaluate Your Draft

This writing process involves doing a full evaluation of your first draft.

At this stage, you have to take the feedback that you’ve received into account. It’s also an excellent opportunity to address possible mistakes with grammar or mechanics.

For fiction writers, this writing stage allows you to ask whether the readers like your main character. Likewise, non-fiction writers have to ask if their content addresses their audience’s questions.

After evaluating your work, you can move to the revision stage of writing.

5. Revising Your Draft

Revision involves making changes to your work based on the feedback you received and thorough evaluation. This writing process is especially useful for fiction writers.

Along with correcting structural problems in your story, it also allows you to find loose ends and tie them up. You can also add or remove content to improve your write-up’s flow and usefulness.

When you’re done revising, you’ll have a new draft that takes you closer to your  writing goal .

At this point, your newest revision becomes your latest draft. After that, you may opt to edit your own work using a content writing and editing tool like INK or hire a professional editor.

6. Editing your Content

The editing aspect of the writing process is about eliminating possible errors in your revised content. These include elements that can affect your text’s accuracy, clarity, and readability.

The editing process also addresses misquoted content, factual errors, awkward phrasing, and unnecessary repetition. Not only does good editing make your work easier, but it also makes the text more enjoyable.

Specialized writing tools such as INK could prove useful for editing web content. But it’s best to avoid self-editing for books. Consider hiring a professional editor for novels and non-fiction books.

7. Publishing your Content

The last stage of the writing process involves sharing your text with your audience.

There are various ways to publish your content, depending on the content type. For example, you can share your book using self-publishing platforms such as Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and CreateSpace .

Whatever the writing may be, the writing processes outlined above will help you create an excellent piece.

What is the Most Important Step in the Writing Process?

Educators have not reached a consensus on the most important writing process . Some would argue that the prewriting stage is the most critical for completing a piece of writing.

After all, brainstorming is required to create an idea that’ll eventually become the content. Besides, writers can use the prewriting stage to avoid or overcome writer’s block.

Meanwhile, educators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill believe that the revision stage is the most critical. It’s when a piece of writing undergoes the most changes.

It could entail increasing the word count to supply as much information as possible. You could also rearrange some aspect of the manuscript to improve the content’s flow, pacing, and sequence.

Read More: 10 Effective Content Writing Techniques for Beginners

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Sumbo Bello is a creative writer who enjoys creating data-driven content for news sites. In his spare time, he plays basketball and listens to Coldplay.

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Home » Literacy Lines » Stages of the Writing Process

Stages of the Writing Process

Beginning in the 1960’s, Hayes and Flower (1980) researched the steps that proficient writers take in order to better understand how to teach writing. They initially developed a model of the writing process with three stages: planning , translating , and reviewing . Over the years, the model was informed by new research and modified to include four stages (Hayes, 1996, 2004): Pre-Writing, Text Production, Revising, Editing. Today, it is accepted practice that students be taught to follow the stages of the writing process when they write.

One of the Common Core anchor writing standards focuses on the writing process : Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach. The Institute of Education Sciences research guide Teaching Elementary School Students to Be Effective Writers (Graham et al., 2012) recommends teaching students to use the writing process for a variety of purposes, noting, “It is a process that requires that the writer think carefully about the purpose for writing, plan what to say, plan how to say it, and understand what the reader needs to know.” The report goes on to explain, “Writing is not a linear process, like following a recipe to bake a cake. It is flexible; writers should learn to move easily back and forth between components of the writing process, often altering their plans and revising their text along the way. Components of the writing process include planning, drafting, sharing, evaluating, revising, and editing.” (pp 12, 14)

Teaching the Stages of the Writing Process

Ten years ago I proposed a model for teaching the writing process that includes four stages: THINK , PLAN , WRITE , REVISE . The title of this model, T he P rocess W riting R outine , is designed to help students recall the stages of the writing process by linking the four stages to the first letters of the words in the title. The graphic below shows the four stages with details about the tasks associated with each stage. One of the modules in the Keys to Content Writing professional development course is focused on the stages of the writing process Click here to access a copy of this handout from the free resources section of the Keys to Literacy website.

As the IES guide notes, writers repeat and revisit the stages several times as they develop a piece of writing. For example, students may realize while they are writing a first draft of an informational piece that they need to go back to the THINK stage to gather more information about the topic. While revising the draft, they may determine that they need to go back to the PLAN stage to reorganize the content. The arrow serves as a reminder that writing stages are overlapping parts of a process that may be repeated multiple times as writing unfolds.

It is helpful to provide a visual reminder of the writing process to students such as displaying The Process Writing Routine in a classroom anchor chart, as a handout for students to keep in their notebooks, or as a digital resource file. The poster shown below is available from Keys to Literacy .

Too often, students assume the focus of their attention should be on writing. They do not spend sufficient time at the THINK and PLAN stages, or they skip them altogether. The amount of time spent on each stage will vary depending on the writing task, but a common recommendation is to spend 40% of the time reading, gathering ideas and information, and taking notes (THINK and PLAN); 20% of the time draft writing (WRITE); and 40% of the time rewriting and revising, including editing for conventions (REVISE). Students need to learn that in most cases, spending more time at the THINK and PLAN stages will produce a better writing draft and save time at the REVISE stage.

Introducing the Stages to Young Students

I have simplified the stages for young students in the primary grades, as shown below and addressed in one of the modules in the Keys to Early Writing professional development course. The more basic model combines the first two stages and includes visual cues. A copy of this graphic is available at the free resources section of the Keys to Literacy website.

Students in kindergarten and grade 1 may not be developmentally ready to formally revise their work and instead may focus their editing on adding more to their drawings, labels, phrases, or sentences. View the suggestions below for introducing young students to the stages of the writing process.

• Generating Ideas and Organizing: What do I want to say? How will I present what I want to say?
• Using Drawing and Words: How can I use drawings, words, and sentences to communicate what I want to say?
• Improving: Can I add more detail to my drawing or words?

Teaching Students Strategies for Each Stage of the Writing Process

Research consistently confirms that teaching strategies to students for planning, revising, and editing their writing pieces can have a dramatic effect on the quality of their writing (Graham & Perin, 2007; Graham et al., 2012; Graham et al., 2017). Strategy instruction involves explicitly teaching generic processes such as peer collaboration or note taking, or strategies for accomplishing specific types of writing tasks such as writing a summary or a story. Some strategies incorporate a scaffold such as a graphic organizer or a writing template. The following earlier blog posts provide instructional suggestions for writing strategies:

• Teaching Text Structure to Support Writing and Comprehension
• The Might Paragraph
• Teaching Handwriting
• The Power of Transition Words
• Syntactic Awareness: Teaching Sentence Structure Part 1
• Syntactic Awareness: Teaching Sentence Structure Part 2
• Explicit Instruction of Note Taking Skills
• Patterns of Organization

RELATED RESOURCES

• Vide o: Teach Students to Use the Writing Process for a Variety of Purposes (Institute of Education Sciences)
• The Writing Process (University of Kansas Writing Center)
• Stages of the Writing Process (Purdue Online Writing Lab)
• Graham, S., Bollinger, A., Booth Olson, C., D’Aoust, C., MacArthur, C., McCutchen, D., & Olinghouse, N. (2012). Teaching elementary school students to be effective writers: A practice guide (NCEE 2012- 4058). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Insti­tute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.
• Graham, S., Bruch, J., Fitzgerald, J., Friedrich, L., Furgeson, J., Greene, K., Kim, J., Lyskawa, J., Olson, C.B., & Smither Wulsin, C. (2016). Teaching secondary students to write effectively (NCEE 2017-4002). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE), Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.
• Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). Writing next: Effective strategies to improve the writing of adolescents in middle and high schools – A report to Carnegie Corporation of New York. Washington, DC: Alliance for  Excellent Education.
• Sedita, J. (2020). Keys to Early Writin g. Rowley, MA: Keys to Literacy.
• Sedita, J. (2020). Keys to Content Writing. Rowley, MA: Keys to Literacy.
• Joan Sedita

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The 6 stages of the writing process: A helpful guide for authors

Posted on June 11, 2020 at 1:23 PM by Guest Author

As an author, you should be familiar with the six basic stages of the writing process. Discover more about why this process is important and what each stage entails.

Table of Contents

Why You Should Know the Stages of the Writing Process

Stage 1 – Prewriting

Stage 2 – Planning

Stage 3 – Drafting

Stage 4 – Revising

Stage 5 – Editing

Stage 6 – Publishing  

Why you should know the stages of the writing process   .

Like most authors, you likely have your own unique approach to writing books.

When you sit down to tell a story or provide in-depth coverage of a topic, you follow certain steps to bring your idea to life.

Although there’s nothing wrong with tackling each new project according to your personal preferences, it’s still worth revisiting the six basic stages of the writing process from time to time.         

First , it’s simply a good practice to develop, especially if writing professionally is something you’ve only started doing recently.

Running through the various stages of the writing process ensures you’ve covered your bases. It keeps you organized and helps you work more efficiently. As a result, you can look forward to a better finished product every time. 

Second , consciously going through each stage of the writing process can be a great way of getting unstuck when you’re struggling to take an idea to the finish line.

Although writing is a creative endeavor, sometimes it helps to have a little more structure. Just knowing how to begin can break down those mental barriers that keep you from moving forward. 

Third , though you may have your own routine when it comes to writing, chances are you’re following the basic steps anyway — even if you don’t realize it.

In that case, it wouldn’t hurt to familiarize yourself with the terminology. That way, you can keep a mental (or physical) checklist, adjusting it to fit your creative workflow .  

With all of that in mind, we wanted to take this opportunity to give you a refresher on (or possibly an introduction to) the six stages of the writing process.

Ready? Let’s dive in…

Stage 1 – Prewriting  

As the name suggests, the prewriting stage consists of the work you do before you actually start writing your book.

This stage tends to vary the most from one author to the next, as everyone generates ideas differently. Ultimately, it comes down to how you brainstorm and flesh out concepts that pop into your head.    

Some of the tasks you may perform during this stage include…

Jotting down notes about a real-life scene

Drawing inspiration from a childhood event

Gathering information about a topic that interests you

Thinking about how a character should look, sound, and act

Pulling out part of a writing prompt 

When one of your ideas begins to take shape, that’s when you move on to the next stage. 

Stage 2 – Planning  

It’s fair to say that planning is one of the most important stages of the writing process.

Without at least a general sketch of your characters or path for your plot, you’re more likely to hit a roadblock halfway through writing.

By planning ahead of time, however, you can typically avoid such an issue and have a much easier time crafting your book. 

This stage may look very different depending on whether you’re a pantser (someone who prefers letting their story develop naturally) or a plotter (someone who likes to plan out every aspect of their book).

And it’s worth noting there are pros and cons to each. 

No matter how you operate, you should put time and effort into your initial outline, allowing yourself some flexibility in terms of story structure, character development, and more. 

Once you’ve finished planning, it’s time to start writing!

Stage 3 – Drafting  

The drafting stage is all about getting your words down on paper (or screen). It’s not about trying to create the perfect book right off the bat, as you’ll work on revising and editing the initial draft later on.

If you’re a first-time writer, you may struggle with this. However, you just need to keep a couple of things in mind…

The first draft is for your eyes only.

You can always go back and make changes. 

There really aren’t any set rules about how to draft your book. It’s just a matter of completing the initial draft from start to finish.

If you find yourself faltering midway through the first chapter, try skipping to the end — whatever pushes you to move forward.  

After you’ve completed your first draft, it’s best to wait at least a few days before proceeding to the next stage. 

Stage 4 – Revising  

Many authors consider revising to be one of the most challenging stages of the writing process. 

Because it requires you to scrutinize your first draft , which can be downright painful. Essentially, you need to be your own critic and try to remain as objective as possible.

During this stage, the goal is to start cleaning up and shaping your story.

Some of the ways to do this include… 

Adding details your readers need to understand what’s going on

Rearranging passages to improve the flow or pacing of the story

Removing sections that don’t fit or add little value

Eliminating awkward sentences or language

Ensuring your character’s actions make sense

Balancing exposition and dialogue

Making each scene as compelling as possible 

When you’ve made all the necessary revisions and are generally happy with the draft you have, set it aside for a couple of weeks before moving on to editing.     

Stage 5 – Editing  

In the editing stage, your primary objective is to fine-tune your book. You want to ensure your writing is as smooth as possible, your story makes sense, and your text is free from errors.

Even if you edit as you go, you can still end up making mistakes and leaving things out. That’s why it’s crucial to read your manuscript in its entirety so you can fix those trouble areas.  

Although there are plenty of resources out there to help you develop your writing skills so you can self-edit more effectively, it may be worth bringing on a professional to edit your book as well.

Doing so not only puts another pair of eyes on your manuscript but also allows you to take advantage of another’s expertise. 

It may take a few drafts before you deem your book “ready,” but once you reach that point, it’s time to advance to the last stage.

Once you’ve put the finishing touches on your book, you need to figure out how to make it available to readers.

There are a few ways to get your book published , including…

Taking the traditional publishing route

Hiring a company to publish your book

Submitting your book to a publisher independently

Opting to self-publish your book 

Each option has its benefits and drawbacks. The one you choose depends on your budget and needs.

If you decide to self-publish, bring in others to ensure your book is truly ready and avoid publishing too early.    

There you have it — the six stages of the writing process. If you followed along with us, you should now have a deeper understanding of what’s involved in taking a book from idea to finished product. 

Remember that the approach you take to creating a book may not look exactly like this, and that’s okay! However, familiarizing yourself with these basic stages and revisiting them every so often can make things go a lot smoother.  

(If you’ve completed the last stage of the writing process, it’s time to get your published work out to readers! Click HERE to learn more about promoting your free ebook in our newsletter to reach thousands of potential fans.)

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Writing process: From discovery to done (complete guide)

The writing process has many stages, from discovery and investigation to publication. Read authors’ insights on finding ideas, revision and more, and tips and methods to find the process that works for you.

• Post author By Jordan
• 5 Comments on Writing process: From discovery to done (complete guide)

The writing process is a complex, not always linear creative process. From ‘plotters’ vs ‘pantsers’ (to ‘bashers’ vs ‘swoopers’), this guide unpacks stages of the writing process, what authors have said about the practices and habits of writing, and more. Use the links above to jump to the section that interests you now.

Writing process stages: 7 areas of practice

Some writing schools and authors divide writing into four stages, some five. Yet these seven see a story from first idea to publication:

• Discovery. Before you can draft, you need an idea, a premise. This is the investigative stage of finding the seed for a story with the most potential.
• Prewriting . The preparation to write before drafting begins. Depending on whether you’re a ‘plotter’ or ‘pantser’ (more on this below), this may include outlining, brainstorming, freewriting, or other common prewriting techniques.
• Drafting. You write narration, exposition, scenes, chapters (depending on your story’s format). Drafting may be fast or slow, depending on your preferred methods. Try different approaches and techniques to shake up your usual writing habits.
• Writing feedback and story development. Once you are comfortable to share your work-in-progress (WIP), you may share early drafts with a trusted friend, writing coach or critique circle for perspective and insight.
• Revision . The process of reviewing what you’ve written, deciding what to keep (and which ‘darlings’ to ‘kill’).
• Editing. While revision entails making decisions about the content of your story, editing involves making decisions about the presentation of that content – how best to make the story more impactful and polished.
• Publication (and promotion). Isn’t the writing process over at this stage? Not at all – your query letters, story pitches, blurbs, review requests and other matter will be some of the most important material of the entire writing process. This is the writing that puts the story you’ve labored over in the right hands.

Keep reading for tips, methods and ideas about each of these stages, supplemented by reading from the Now Novel blog.

Recommended reading

• The writing process: 7 steps to structure and success

To the top ↑

Sometimes we fail for a week, a month, a year, a decade. And then we come back, circle the fire. Our lives are not linear. We get lost, then we get found. Patience is important, and a large tolerance for our mistakes. We don’t become anything overnight. Natalie Goldberg, The True Secret of Writing (2013), p. 58.

Discovery: Finding and investigating writing ideas

The writing process may start from an idea that arrives like a soothsayer. A flash of inspiration, insight, wisdom – a dream, unexpected connection, some kind of beguiling chance encounter or happenstance that makes you say, ‘I’ve got an idea’.

Yet the idea-finding process may equally be deliberate, even robotic. Consistently trying your hand at writing prompts until an idea niggles away at your waking mind, for example, persistently saying, ‘pick me’.

Finding and developing writing ideas is a skill you develop like any part of the writing process. That way you can make an idea come, not just for a first book, but a second, third (if with a little coaxing).

Essayist and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin said of the writing process:

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven. Walter Benjamin, quote via Goodreads .

Before you make a picture with those threads, you need the wool you spin into finer thread: The fluffy stuff of an idea.

Writing process methods: Ways to find ideas

There are many ways to find ideas and find joy in the discovery stage of writing process.

Discovery and investigation may include a little or a lot of research, depending on what you need to know. The seed of an idea may come from multiple sources at once, as Toni Morrison says of her Pulitzer-winning novel Beloved :

Beloved originated as a general question, and was launched by a newspaper clipping. The general question (remember, this was the early eighties) centered on how – other than equal rights, access, pay, etc. – does the women’s movement define the freedom being sought? Toni Morrison, ‘On Beloved ‘ in Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations, p. 281.

Here are fifteen ways to find ideas:

15 ways to find writing ideas and begin the writing process

• Try writing prompts such as the step-by-step prompts to find a central story idea in the Now Novel dashboard.
• Ask ‘What if…?’ For example, ‘What if a mysterious satellite held captivating mysteries about an alien race?’
• Draw from life. What experience could you use/alter for non-fiction or fiction?
• Use visual prompts. Use a photo or artwork as your starting point. Free-write a paragraph describing what you see, then continue and keep or turf the opening material.
• Play/combine. William S. Burroughs’ famous ‘cut up’ technique reassembles random cuttings from print into new ideas, for example.
• Trawl headlines. Google intriguing subjects in the ‘news’ tab. E.g. ‘travel disasters’ brought up ‘How ‘dark tourism’ can pass on the lessons of past tragedies’. Mine your headline for ideas.
• Explore myths and legends. Reads stories from world mythologies. You could update an ancient tale with modern touches.
• Argue with other stories. Maybe a story’s annoyed you, or you want to explore a secondary character’s viewpoint (from a work now in the public domain). Write back.
• Test out ideas in short fiction. Famous novels (such as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce) began as short story test runs.
• Draw inspiration from music. Listen to a song. What ideas, characters, premises do the lyrics evoke?
• Try creative constraints. The collective OuLiPo used devices such as writing stories omitting a chosen vowel entirely to find the unexpected.
• Browse famous quotes. Take something like ‘Happy families are all alike…’ from Anna Karenina . Where else could it lead?
• Join writing groups. Prompts set by members for each other may inspire new ideas.
• Research historical figures or eras. You may unearth a riveting idea from the past.
• Tap into your subconscious and keep a dream journal or meditate, silence and going inward often brings clarity.

FAQs about the discovery stage of writing

Share your idea with trusted people for external perspective. Test it out in a writing group or class. Ask questions about ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘why’ ‘where’ and ‘when’ to finesse a hazy or partial idea into something deeper, fuller.

The varied ways myths and legends are recycled (Thor in Norse mythology becoming Marvel’s popular character) reminds us there are no new ideas. Originality lies in the specifics of voice and execution. Be specific, be yourself and find your voice through practice and intentional execution.

This is where it helps to remember the writing process is not linear. The discovery stage is also a good time for research, finding out what is being done (and overdone) in your genre. What agents are looking for (or tired of seeing). Resources listing recent publishing deals give insights into what’s sold recently and book market appetites. To start though, focus on telling a good story. Great stories find their audience.

🗣️ How did you find your last story idea? Let us know in the comments, and keep reading for tips and methods for prewriting, drafting, and more.

• 38 plot ideas (plus 7 ways to find more)
• How to find book ideas: 15 easy methods
• Book ideas: 12 fun ways to find them
• Finding story topics when stuck: 5 simple methods

GET YOUR FREE GUIDE TO SCENE STRUCTURE

Read a guide to writing scenes with purpose that move your story forward.

Ideas are like fireflies; go hunting for them and they elude you. Sit and enjoy the night, and they appear from out of nowhere. You have to let the ideas come to you. Expand your world, read outside your comfort zone, take walks. The fireflies will come. Just give them the chance. Sabrina Jeffries in 101 Habits of Highly Successful Novelists: Insider Secrets from Top Writers by Andrew McAleer (2008), p. 69.

Prewriting: Useful preparatory writing processes

Prewriting is the processes before you start drafting a story which help you prepare.

There are many kinds of prewriting. Because the writing process is not linear, you might come back to one or more of these methods at some stage of drafting:

Common prewriting steps and methods

• Picking a premise. If you have multiple ideas, go with the idea that pulls you most and (if you want a marketable book) the one you know has the better market potential.
• Choosing a genre or subgenre. This goes hand in hand with picking a premise, since if you set your book in outer space and explore future technology, chances are you’ll be shelved with sci-fi.
• Brainstorming. A process of generating ideas, whether you use mind maps, answer prompts and questionnaires, or churn out every idea you can think of in scenario- or topic-driven lists.
• Creating a story outline. This may be a meticulous, detailed outline, or a cursory collection of notes. The more complete your outline, the more handrails you’ll have. This prevents wandering off into irrelevancies, plot holes and impossible paradoxes, and so on.
• Creating initial summary material. Summary material includes things like character profiles or IDs, scene summaries , or a one-page synopsis of what your story is about (also a useful exercise in the Publication and promotion stage of process).
• Freewriting. Before more structured drafting, you might explore a topic or scenario with freewriting. Set a timer for 15 to 20 minutes and just write whatever comes into your head about a topic you think will be important to your book. It might spawn scene, chapter, or character ideas.
• Research. This may overlap with the discovery/investigation stage, as your idea may also need a little research to solidify what you want to write about. It might include fiction set in a similar era or place, making a bibliography of potentially helpful non-fiction, speaking to subject exploring films and documentaries, or visiting physical or digital archives. For some tips on how to research place when you can’t visit those places, read our tips.
• Interviewing. This is especially pertinent for types of writing such as historical fiction, non-fiction, memoir. Interviews with subject experts, people who lived through specific events or an era, could provide helpful nuance, context, and ideas for relevant story details.

You don’t necessarily need to do every kind of prewriting. Some authors favor ‘just-in-time’ research (an idea Bujold spoke about in relation to fantasy worldbuilding ).

Authors on prewriting and whether or not to plan stories

The prewriting perspectives below show there are many way to skin (or rather save) a cat. Try different methods and find what works for you .

Loose story outlining

Author Scott King gives this reminder that prewriting (planning, creating structure, organizing) should serve the needs of your story, and stay adaptable to its unique needs:

An outline is a map of your story. It’s not set in stone. Even when you work from an outline, you will discover new twists and turns as you progress. The outline is there to remind you of where you are going so you can’t ever get too far from where you need to be. Since I was working under pressure, I didn’t want to get crazy with how I structured Ameriguns . I defaulted to a three act structure, the kind you’d use in a screenplay, but altered it to fit the needs of the story. Scott King, ‘Outline’ in The 5 Day Novel , 2016, p. 58.

Pullman on how establishing rules is part of play

More broadly, Philip Pullman, in ‘The Practice of Writing’, talks about how having some rules at the start of creative process gives paradoxical freedom to play. He compares guidelines such as rules (or outlines) to choosing where touchdown lies for a football game:

And as we know about all games, it’s much more satisfying to play with rules than without them. If we’re going to enjoy a game of football in the playground, we need to know where the touchline is, and agree on what we’re going to regard as the goalposts. Then we can get on with playing, because the complete freedom of our play is held together and protected by this armature of rules. The first and last and only discovery that the victims of anarchy can make is: no rules, no freedom. Philip Pullman, ‘The Practice of Writing’ in Daemon Voices , pp. 18-19

‘Plotting’ vs ‘Pantsing’: Find your balance between prewriting and drafting

So much has been written and said about whether you should plan stories in detail in advance (‘plotting’), or go where imagination takes you (‘pantsing’, after the expression ‘to fly by the seat of your pants’ or work with instinct and gut more than organized knowledge).

Your writing process may change to suit your project

Author K.M. Weiland raises the useful reminder that your writing process doesn’t need to ape a famous writer’s approach, or be the same across every story you tell:

Each author must discover for himself what methods work best for him. Just because Margaret Atwood does X and Stephen King does Y is no reason to blindly follow suit. Read widely, learn all you can about what works for other authors, and experiment to discover which methods will offer you the best results. K.M. Weiland, ‘Chapter One: Should You Outline?’ in Outlining your Novel: Map your way to success , p. 11.

Planning stories helps character development

Edith Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for writing, said of the space and planning deeper characterization requires:

Type, general character, may be set forth in a few strokes, but the progression, the unfolding of personality […] if the actors in the tale are to retain their individuality for [the reader] through a succession of changing circumstances—this slow but continuous growth requires space, and therefore belongs by definition to a larger, a symphonic plan. Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction: The classic guide to the art of the short story and the novel (1925), p. 33.

Not planning, creative freedom and excitement

Author Lee Child, on the other hand, extolls the benefits of not planning (and not being as pedantic about the marks you hit as an editor or publisher might be):

I write without a plan or an outline. The way I picture my process is this: The novel is a movie stuntman, about to get pushed off a sixty-story building. The prop guys have a square fire-department airbag ready on the sidewalk below. One corner is marked Mystery, one Thriller, one Crime Fiction, and one Suspense. The stuntman is going to land on the bag. (I hope.) But probably not dead-on. Probably somewhat off center. But biased toward which corner? I don’t know yet. And I really don’t mind. I’m excited to find out. Lee Child, ‘Introduction’ in How to Write a Mystery: A handbook from Mystery Writers of America

🗣️ What is your preferred prewriting method? Or do you pants it all the way, or pants a little then switch to planning? Tell us in the comments.

• What is prewriting? Preparing to write with purpose
• Story plotting and structure: Complete guide
• Story planning and outlining: Complete guide
• Story planner success: How to organize your novel

GET HELP PLANNING YOUR BOOK

Join Now Novel for a helpful crit community and live webinars and plotting tools when you upgrade.

Writing process challenges you may encounter

Before we discuss drafting and the writing process, let’s explore common process challenges (and tips to overcome them):

Common hurdles in creative process

There are challenges in creative process that beginning authors and veterans alike face. You’re not alone if you’ve ever gone rounds in the ring with:

• Fear of failure (or success). What happens if a publisher or agent says no? What if reviews or crits are harsh? Or how will you handle sudden public recognition and scrutiny in the event of success?
• Procrastination (avoidance behaviors). When writing a story feels hard, it’s easy to put it off (or use not having time or something else as an excuse not to write).
• Distractibility. Whether you have a condition such as ADHD that adds further focus challenges or are a social media addict, we live in a highly distracting, ‘always on’ world.
• ‘Time Burglars’ . There are many thieves of time that take away from the writing process if you don’t make regular writing a top priority.
• A harsh inner critic. Many aspiring creative people have harsh inner critics who destroy their work before anyone else can.
• Laziness. This is a common reason not to write, too.
• Unpreparedness. Many writers find projects spool out and become much harder and more complex than originally anticipated. That can be discouraging.

Overcoming writing process challenges

How can you work with and overcome some of the above procedural challenges in writing?

• Keep SMART goals: Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-based goals are much easier to track and attain than hazy aims
• Work on tolerance for your mistakes: Everyone makes mistakes starting out, and seasoned pros do, too
• Chunk up complex tasks: Struggling to write a chapter a week to schedule? Try write 300 words per day and set a bigger ‘stretch goal’ (an extra target if you make your first easily)
• Turn off the net if you need to: Put your phone in airplane mode and pause all notifications
• Remember the difference between procrastination and waiting: It’s fine to wait for maturity, fuller knowledge of your subject, to be in the right frame of mind. It’s not putting off but letting process take its necessary time for this story
• Get up and move often: The writing process is (for the most part) a sedentary one. It’s easy to forget to move. Stone-like posture may lead to petrified process, even if your mind’s going a hundred miles a minute

The accountability of working with a writing coach or joining a crit circle that meets regularly helps (in Now Novel’s experience), too.

Natalie Goldberg writes, on procrastination vs waiting:

Waiting is something full-bodied. Perhaps waiting isn’t even a good word for it. Pregnant is better. You’ve worked on something for a while. You are excited by it, even happy, but you are wise and step back. You take a walk, but this walk isn’t to avoid the writing on your desk. It is a walk full of your writing. It is also full of the trees you pass, the river, the sky. You are letting writing work on you. Natalie Goldberg, ‘Procrastination and Waiting’, in Wild Mind: Living the writer’s life , p. 210.

How to nurture your writing process and avoid common pitfalls

We asked Now Novel’s writing coaches their best advice on the writing process, and about patterns they see in beginning writers (and ways to overcome destructive habits).

Romance author and writing coach Romy Sommer on remembering why you’re telling your story:

Writing is hard work. Probably harder than you thought it would be when inspiration first struck and you decided to write a novel. So find the joy in what you are writing. Remind yourself daily of WHY you are writing this story. Remember that spark that first inspired you to sit down and write, because that is what will keep you going when the going gets tough.

SFF and YA author, editor and writing coach Nerine Dorman on allowing yourself to make ‘happy accidents’:

Many writers I’ve worked with lack confidence in their ability, and tend to focus on those first chapters to the point where they lose the momentum to push forward with the rest of the plot. I give them Bob Ross’s advice of making plenty of ‘happy little accidents’ as we can’t actually work on writing if there’s nothing there to revise. Your first draft can be as messy as you need it to be. The most important thing is to get into the habit of writing as regularly as your schedule allows, and to see your writing as a very personal way to express yourself. Granted, there are the basic building blocks of writing and style, which I aim to teach, but I like to think that we also look at what it means to be a writer – a constantly evolving, growing creative person.

Recommended Reading

• How to overcome writer’s block: 14 methods
• Motivation to write: 7 simple strategies
• End writing procrastination now: 7 steps
• Silence your inner critic: 8 ways to write in peace

We have to accept ourselves in order to write. Now none of us does that fully; few of us do it even halfway. Don’t wait for one hundred percent acceptance of yourself before you write, or even eight percent acceptance. Just write. The process of writing is an activity that teaches us about acceptance. Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind: Living the writer’s life , p. 61.

Drafting stories: Getting knee-deep in scenes

We could equally call the drafting stage of process ‘discovery’ like the first stage. After all, drafting is where you discover many of the ‘happy accidents’ Nerine describes above. Discoveries that may often depart from your outline (or lead you back into revision-planning).

Learn more about approaches to drafting, what authors say about doing fewer vs multiple drafts, and tips to make this part of process work for you.

Types of draft in the storytelling process

There are many terms authors use to refer to drafting. Numbered (first, second, third) drafts. Even drafts before the first, the so-called ‘draft zero’ (which describes a discovery draft, the purpose of which is just to learn the broad scope of the story and set down some of the material in full).

In one of Now Novel’s live webinars, writing coach, author and editor Hedi Lampert shared a drafting concept by the late author and writing educator Anne Schuster, who hosted women’s writing workshops in Cape Town.

The idea is a simple, three-part drafting process. To paraphrase:

• The down draft: The draft where you get your ideas down on the page, with as much messiness or as many placeholders as you need to keep moving.
• The up draft: A second draft in which you pick up on details for development, expansion, and color in more of your story.
• The dental draft: A third draft in which you polish the work of your first two drafts, paying attention to language and finer detail now the story elements have solidified.

This is a useful concept in that it gives each stage of drafting a proper focus and purpose (and allows for not getting everything ‘right’ straight away).

Authors on the drafting stage of writing process

Will you draft chapters in chronological sequence or out of order? Should you worry about chapters and scene breaks or carve up the text later?

These are some of the questions authors face about drafting. Read authors on drafting and their individual processes. These perspectives show that what works for one person might not work for another. Try different methods until you find what works for your process, or this project.

Toni Morrison on creating chapters and parts in a draft

Toni Morrison describes putting in story segment divisions at a later point in process:

Chapter and part designations, as conventionally used in novels, were never very much help to me in writing. Nor are outlines. (I permit their use for the sake of the designer and for ease in talking about the book. They are usually identified at the last minute.) Toni Morrison, ‘The Writer Before the Page’, in Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations , p. 266.

Sir Terry Pratchett on the purpose of a first, second and third draft (creative freedom, shaping, addressing detail)

Sir Terry Pratchett said that the first draft is ‘just you telling yourself the story’, and qualified something like a systematic per-draft process when he said:

First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft. Sir Terry Pratchett, via Goodreads

Colleen McCullough on how many drafts until done: It depends

How many drafts ‘should’ you write? It depends, writing is rewriting as Colleen McCullough describes:

Once I’ve got the first draft down on paper then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters and maybe I’ll check my research. Colleen McCullough, quoted by Writers Write here .

🗣️ What is your drafting process currently? Is there a system, number of drafts or method that works well for you? Share it in the comments.

• Writing first drafts: 10 ideas to reach final drafts
• Write with purpose: 7 ways to keep drafts focused
• How to write a rough draft: Finish your novel faster

The concept of finishing a piece of writing, taking it through successive drafts, did not yet exist for me. I reveled in the heady pleasure of committing a few words to paper and treasured each like a rare jewel I had dug from the earth with my bare hands. A journal suited my fledgling status as a writer and made me feel serious and important, a real writer, and honored the scant output I produced. In my journal I practiced being a writer in both senses of the word: practiced as in trying out, and practiced as in keeping a daily practice, the way the nuns observed their daily order of prayer services. Katherine Towler, in Writers and Their Notebooks , edited by Diana M. Raab, pp. 65-66.

Writing feedback and story development

Remember that we said the writing process is not always linear?

When you get writing feedback depends on you. You may want feedback on your story idea or summary, your early chapters. You may prefer not to show your WIP to anyone until you’re at least one or more drafts deep. Tweet This

Maybe you move between drafting rounds, and feedback rounds, as you use readers’ perspectives to tweak your story and workshop it.

Why getting feedback is a crucial stage of writing process

When we don’t have critiques, manuscript evaluations, editors or beta readers, we only have our own perspectives to rely upon. You get used to your own mistakes, and nobody knows their own blind spots or the details they hadn’t thought of (that a shrewd second opinion might).

To ensure feedback aids (more than frustrates) your writing process:

• Get feedback from writers you trust. You might want input from writers at a similar stage of development to yourself, or editors who have been story doctors for some time.
• Take feedback from whence it comes. That crosspatch member of your crit circle who never has a nice word to say? Expect the kind of feedback that person usually gives. If a crit circle or beta reader is harsh or overwhelmingly negative, it’s OK to find a better fit.
• Stay open to perspectives and use what’s useful. There’s that saying, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.’ Don’t get parched just to protect your ego. Reviewers on major platforms could be way harsher if you don’t take time to fix what isn’t working.
• Describe what feedback you’re looking for. Now Novel’s critique submission system contains categories you can check off for feedback, such as ‘grammar and language’, ‘characters’, ‘structure and flow’ and ‘dialogue’. Specifying what kind of feedback you want helps readers tailor their feedback to be more relevant to your needs.
• Give any necessary context. Nobody knows your writing process or story better than you do. Remember to contextualize anything an editor or beta reader may need to know to have a better understanding of what you’re aiming for (in style, subject matter, tone, characterization, etc.).

Giving feedback also does wonders for many authors’ writing processes – helping others with writing challenges helps you build the tools to solve your own.

Channeling feedback into the writing process

Too much feedback (especially if overly harsh as it can be in poorly moderated communities), especially in the early stages of a story, may inhibit or discourage. When evaluating writing feedback, ask:

• Is there overlap between what feedback givers are saying? This could signal a real and higher priority issue to address in revision
• What is higher vs lower priority feedback to implement? Major confusion-bringing issues such as continuity issues or tense drift and head-hopping are naturally a higher priority than minor details that don’t affect whether readers can understand the story, for example

When getting and giving feedback in a crit circle or a beta reading community, it’s easy to compare yourself to other writers. Writing coach Romy Sommer advises against comparisons:

Do not compare yourself to other writers. We each work differently, we each need to find the writing process that works best for our lives and the way our brains work, and what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another. Accepting that took a huge weight off my shoulders and enabled me to embrace my own process.

The development stage of creative process: Comb story’s nose, blow its hair

As Terry Pratchett says, developing a story – later rewrites and drafts – gets into grooming-like detail. Combing a story’s … nose!? You may well find that there are Picasso-like parts, or the princess’s hair is snotty, not sleek. Tweet This

At the developmental stage of writing, ask yourself questions an editor would, such as:

• Is it clear? Does the reader have sufficient context or clear wording to understand the story and follow along?
• Does it have cohesion? Do actions and reactions flow and make sense? When characters converse, does it have the pattern of real call and response or is it like two people with crossed wires?
• Is the story ‘colored in’? Is there sufficient description (and are descriptions specific/detailed, not hazy)?
• Are events and actions clear and intriguing? Does the procession of events create questions the reader wants answered?
• Is there flow between lines, scenes, chapters? Or if the story is non-linear, do the pieces come together to make an interesting, impactful whole?

Here’s a fuller checklist with 34 story development questions for rewrites and successive drafts:

• How to find beta readers for final draft feedback
• Writing circle pros: 8 reasons to share your story
• 100 character development questions to inspire deeper arcs
• How to master plot development: 8 steps

Writers have always struggled with the same core issues: getting the work done (productivity) and creating something worth reading (creativity). And, unless you believe that misery is necessary for true art, aim for a third goal: making the process enjoyable, cultivating a fulfilling and happy life that includes writing. Let’s consider this our triple objective: productivity, creativity, and enjoyment. Surely that’s not asking too much? Anne Janzer, ‘Finding Your Own Process’ in The Writer’s Process: Getting your brain in gear, p. 15

Revision: Seeing again with fresh eyes

The word ‘revision’ says it all. The fifth stage of the writing process is seeing again, reviewing what you’ve written, to make insertions/deletions as needed.

There may be parts of your story that would benefit much from expansion, coloring in. Maybe there are parts that you have to cull, as much as you may feel attached to them.

Revision vs editing: What’s the difference?

Revision is a process of making decisions about the content of your story. It may include:

• Adding in new scenes, chapters or sections
• Rearranging scenes, chapters or sections
• Cutting out subplots or other material that aren’t contributing to the whole sufficiently
• Trying a different person to determine the effects on POV

That last example touches on an important truth about revision: it’s as creative as drafting, and it can be a fun process of play, of trying out different things.

Editing, on the other hand, is focused on improving the presentation of decisions made about content. Often, you may find that an editor suggests further revisions. This is work that you’ll do, because only you (as the author) are qualified to make this level of creative decision, it being your story.

Authors’ ideas on revision and the writing process

What do authors say about the revision process?

Joyce Carol Oates on revising as you go being arduous

Joyce Carol Oates shared that her writing methods changed over time, as she grew older:

I think that I envy my younger self because I used to write a whole draft of a novel and then go back and rewrite it […] Today, I do a lot of revising as I go along and that seems to be more painful and arduous. It’s a slow process, almost like putting a mosaic together or weaving things in and out, whereas before it felt more like galloping on a horse and then creating the manuscript. For some reason I’ve become more attuned to the individual sentence and reworking the sentences. I’m not sure why that happened. Joyce Carol Oates, USA Weekend , quoted by famouswritingroutines.com here .

This raises an important decision about revising: When will you stop to review and tweak elements? If you stop every page, prepare for a first draft that may take years! Give yourself the time your process dictates.

Jamaica Kincaid on the internal revision process

Of course, your revision is not only the work you do on paper. Dame Agatha Christie said the best time to plot a novel was while doing the dishes. Jamaica Kincaid, in conversation with Publishers Weekly , says:

I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It’s not spontaneous and it doesn’t have a schedule. You know how some people write every day at a certain point? I’m not like that. I carry something around for a long time. I weigh the words and the sentences. I weigh the paragraphs. The process is much more meditative for me. So, when I put something down on paper, I’ve already edited a lot. Jamaica Kincaid, interviewed by Liesel Schwabe, ‘The Age of a Mountain: PW Talks with Jamaica Kincaid’, December 2012.

🗣️ What is your approach to revision? Do you sit with ideas a long time, write at a gallop and then revise, or make painstaking revisions as you go? Share in the comments.

• Revision in writing: How to improve between drafts
• Novel editing insights: 9 big lessons from critique

GET FEEDBACK AND HELP WITH REVISION

Join The Process for weekly editor critiques, monthly live workshops, story outlining tools and more.

Editing: The polishing stage of writing process

Editing, the penultimate stage of writing process, is itself made up of several important stages. It’s often a challenging one because there is an even bigger degree of ‘letting go’. Letting someone make tracked changes and suggestions to your manuscript, for example.

When you hand over writing to an editor, you may be getting your first sample of ‘reception’ (if you have been working in private, not with a crit circle). T.S. Eliot drily said, ‘Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.’

Editing is often an immensely enriching process, though, for both editor and author. Earnest discussion and deep thought about a story’s strengths (and how best to serve them) and challenges (and how best to address them) may unearth surprising gems.

The main types of fiction editing

The four main types of editing are:

• Developmental editing. This examines large-picture aspects such as character and story development, narrative structure and pacing.
• Line editing. More detail-oriented, line-level editing that examines issues such as language, style, flow and clarity.
• Copy editing: Focuses on grammar, spelling, punctuation, and eliminating errors and residual issues with style or flow that may be left over from (or have crept in after) line editing.
• Proofreading: The final stage of editing, catching any final errors before publication (a stage self-publishing authors may be tempted to omit, but do so at risk of excoriating reviews).

Many editing providers, including Now Novel, offer manuscript evaluations . This is often bundled with developmental editing as a part of discovery process (we subtract the cost of an evaluation from developmental editing). A manuscript evaluation produces a reader’s report with actionable recommendations on aspects such as plot and character development, narrative structure, pacing, conflict and more.

Is editing writing process? It is in that it is en route to publication. How much writing you’ll do at this stage depends on how much revision there is to be done.

If you have excellent language faculty and a strong grasp of story, an editor may recommend you proceed straight to copy editing from an evaluation, if there are no large-scale issues.

• Editing and revising: 7 tips from top authors and editors
• Editing copy? 8 tips for a word-perfect manuscript

Publication and promotion: Writing around your story

Does the writing process end once your work’s edited? Some would say ‘yes’. Yet publication and promotion involve a lot of writing ‘around’ your story, about your story. Press, promotion, selling.

This isn’t a type of writing (and part of process) that’s for everyone (you may want to outsource some of this work – for example writing social media captions – to a marketing agency if or once you can afford it).

Publication and the writing process

Types of writing you’ll do when you’re ready to publish include:

• Writing query letters or script pitches
• Writing bios for author pages
• Writing newsletters, social media captions, and other marketing material
• Writing speeches or guest blogs about the process of writing your story

Promotion and publication are a whole other side of process that we’ll cover in fuller detail in another complete guide.

See the resources recommended reading below for tips on aspects such as creating your author brand, creating a business plan, and ways to get more reviews.

Helpful resources for publication and promotion writing

Here are several resources that provide tips on publication and promotion as well as useful examples:

• Publishers Weekly – frequent round-ups of publishing news and interesting developments in publishing
• Query Shark – examples of query letters dissected by an agent
• Jane Friedman’s blog – with twenty years’ experience in the publishing industry, Jane shares helpful publishing insights such as how to query and how to avoid publishing scams
• Joanna Penn’s The Creative Penn – a helpful blog featuring podcasts and articles packed with publishing and book promotion insights
• Kindlepreneur – writer Dave Chesson has a site devoted to book publishing and promotion how to’s, useful for self-publishing authors.

🗣️ Is there a book publishing and promo resource you love you don’t see here? Let us know about it in the comments.

• How to write a query letter: 10 easy steps
• Writing to market: 10 pros and cons to weigh
• Self-publishing on Ama zon: 20 pros and cons for authors
• How to create a business plan for writers

Now Novel provides help with every stage of the writing process. Learn more about membership benefits for serious writers .

Related Posts:

• Writing dialogue: Complete guide to storied speech
• Character writing: Complete guide to creating your cast
• Writing romance and love stories: Complete guide
• Tags writing process

Jordan is a writer, editor, community manager and product developer. He received his BA Honours in English Literature and his undergraduate in English Literature and Music from the University of Cape Town.

5 replies on “Writing process: From discovery to done (complete guide)”

I’m mostly a pantser, I think. I let the ideas take me where they want to go with an end point in mind. The problem is that I don’t always like the direction, missing that fireman cushion completely. I feel like I’ve given away a piece of my soul to have to start over (I don’t want to say second draft because it feels more like a new zero). I know how important it is to get to the end, but if I truly have a fresh idea I have to go down that road, but I’m so scared it’ll take me straight to Hades… again. Eventually, I’ll be very well versed in writing my own story, I suppose. Lots and lots of practice.

Hi Margriet, thank you for sharing that. It’s very interesting as a method as you do end up doing a lot of review and revision as you go. Have you every thought of having some kind of ‘pantsers compromise’ of maybe outlining one scene ahead? Something Ernest Hemingway said was to the effect of ‘stop for the day when you know what happens next’ which might be one way to keep Hades and his kidnappers at bay 🙂 Thank you for sharing your process!

Thanks for this Jordan – comprehensive doesn’t do it justice!

For me, the difference between being someone who wanted to complete a first draft and actually doing it was definitely when I stopped being a panther and embraced the value of plotting & planning.

I’m still more of a plantser than someone who plots things to the nth degree, but having a very clear idea of at least the first 20-30% of the novel is going to go, with an idea of the way it’s going to end allows me the flexibility and freedom to start the novel with confidence that I’m going to finish, because I have a pretty good map of the journey and the destination.

I know I’m going to get “there”, even if the actual final destination changes along the way, or if I take a few pretty little detours along the way. I’ve used two different plotting approaches to complete 3 first drafts now – so I think it’s not necessarily what plotting style you go for, it’s about having one and making it work.

Hi Mark, it’s a pleasure. Thank you for sharing that. I love the happy accident of ‘panther’ in particular. Because that describes what pantsers are like, pouncing with minimum hesitation. That makes total sense to me; each story will also have its own demands in terms of the mix of research and other stages required so process may have to adapt to the demands of a specific work.

I saw that and had a little chuckle at myself – the inner pantser lives on!

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The Writing Process

  The Writing Process Explained

Understanding the writing process provides a student with a straightforward step-by-step procedure that they can follow. It means they can replicate the process no matter what type of nonfiction text they are asked to produce.

In this article, we’ll look at the 5 step writing process that guides students from prewriting to submitting their polished work quickly and easily.

While explaining each stage of the process in detail, we’ll suggest some activities you can use with your students to help them successfully complete each stage. 

THE STAGES OF THE WRITING PROCESS

The five steps of the writing process are made up of the following stages:

• Pre-writing: In this stage, students brainstorm ideas, plan content, and gather the necessary information to ensure their thinking is organized logically.
• Drafting: Students construct ideas in basic sentences and paragraphs without getting caught up with perfection. It is in this stage that the pre-writing process becomes refined and shaped.
• Revising: This is where students revise their draft and make changes to improve the content, organization, and overall structure. Any obvious spelling and grammatical errors might also be improved at this stage.
• Editing: It is in this stage where students make the shift from improving the structure of their writing to focusing on enhancing the written quality of sentences and paragraphs through improving word choice, punctuation, and capitalization, and all spelling and grammatical errors are corrected. Ensure students know this is their final opportunity to alter their writing, which will play a significant role in the assessment process.
• Submitting / Publishing: Students can share their writing with the world, their teachers, friends, and family through various platforms and tools.

Be aware that this list is not a definitive linear process, and it may be advisable to revisit some of these steps in some cases as students learn the craft of writing over time.

Daily Quick Writes For All Text Types

Our FUN DAILY QUICK WRITE TASKS will teach your students the fundamentals of CREATIVE WRITING across all text types. Packed with 52 ENGAGING ACTIVITIES

STAGE ONE: THE WRITING PROCESS

GET READY TO WRITE

The prewriting stage covers anything the student does before they begin to draft their text. It includes many things such as thinking, brainstorming, discussing ideas with others, sketching outlines, gathering information through interviewing people, assessing data, and researching in the library and online.

The intention at the prewriting stage is to collect the raw material that will fuel the writing process. This involves the student doing 3 things:

• Understanding the conventions of the text type
• Gathering up facts, opinions, ideas, data, vocabulary, etc through research and discussion
• Organizing resources and planning out the writing process.

By the time students have finished the pre-writing stage, they will want to have completed at least one of these tasks depending upon the text type they are writing.

• Choose a topic: Ensure your students select a topic that is interesting and relevant to them.
• Brainstorm ideas: Once they have a topic, brainstorm and write their ideas down, considering what they already know about the topic and what they need to research further. Students might want to use brainstorming techniques such as mind mapping, free writing, or listing.
• Research: This one is crucial for informational and nonfiction writing. Students may need to research to gather more information and use reliable sources such as books, academic journals, and credible websites.
• Organize your ideas: This can be challenging for younger students, but once they have a collection of ideas and information, help them to organize them logically by creating an outline, using headings and subheadings, or grouping related ideas.
• Develop a thesis statement: This one is only for an academic research paper and should clearly state your paper’s main idea or argument. It should be specific and debatable.

Before beginning the research and planning parts of the process, the student must take some time to consider the demands of the text type or genre they are asked to write, as this will influence how they research and plan.

PREWRITING TEACHING ACTIVITY

As with any stage in the writing process, students will benefit immensely from seeing the teacher modelling activities to support that stage.

In this activity, you can model your approach to the prewriting stage for students to emulate. Eventually, they will develop their own specific approach, but for now, having a clear model to follow will serve them well.

Starting with an essay title written in the center of the whiteboard, brainstorm ideas as a class and write these ideas branching from the title to create a mind map. 

From there, you can help students identify areas for further research and help them to create graphic organizers to record their ideas.

Explain to the students that while idea generation is an integral part of the prewriting stage, generating ideas is also important throughout all the other stages of the writing process.

STAGE TWO: THE WRITING PROCESS

PUT YOUR IDEAS ON PAPER

Drafting is when the student begins to corral the unruly fruits of the prewriting stage into orderly sentences and paragraphs. 

When their writing is based on solid research and planning, it will be much easier for the student to manage. A poorly executed first stage can see pencils stuck at the starting line and persistent complaints of ‘writer’s block’ from the students.

However, do encourage your students not to get too attached to any ideas they may have generated in Stage 1. Writing is thinking too and your students need to leave room for their creativity to express itself at all stages of the process.

The most important thing about this stage is for the student to keep moving. A text is written word-by-word, much as a bricklayer builds a wall by laying brick upon brick. 

Instill in your students that they shouldn’t get too hung up on stuff like spelling and grammar in these early stages. 

Likewise, they shouldn’t overthink things. The trick here is to get the ideas down fast – everything else can be polished up later.

DRAFTING TEACHING ACTIVITY

As mentioned in the previous activity, writing is a very complex process and modeling goes a long way to helping ensure our students’ success. 

Sometimes our students do an excellent job in the prewriting stage with understanding the text purpose, the research, and the planning, only to fall flat when it comes to beginning to write an actual draft.

Often, students require some clear modeling by the teacher to help them transition effectively from Stage 1 to Stage 2. 

One way to do this for your class is to take the sketches, notes, and ideas one of the students has produced in Stage 1, and use them to model writing a draft. This can be done as a whole class shared writing activity.

Doing this will help your students understand how to take their raw material and connect their ideas and transition between them in the form of an essay.

STAGE THREE: THE WRITING PROCESS

POLISH YOUR THINKING

In Stage two, the emphasis for the student was on getting their ideas out quickly and onto the paper. 

Stage three focuses on refining the work completed earlier with the reader now firmly at the forefront of the writer’s mind.

To revise, the student needs to cast a critical eye over their work and ask themselves questions like:

• Would a reader be able to read this text and make sense of it all?
• Have I included enough detail to help the reader clearly visualize my subject?
• Is my writing concise and as accurate as possible?
• Are my ideas supported by evidence and written in a convincing manner?
• Have I written in a way that is suitable for my intended audience?
• Is it written in an interesting way?
• Are the connections between ideas made explicit?
• Does it fulfill the criteria of the specific text type?
• Is the text organized effectively?

The questions above represent the primary areas students should focus on at this stage of the writing process. 

Students shouldn’t slip over into editing/proofreading mode just yet. Let the more minor, surface-level imperfections wait until the next stage.

REVISING TEACHING ACTIVITY

When developing their understanding of the revising process, it can be extremely helpful for students to have a revision checklist to work from.

It’s also a great idea to develop the revision checklist as part of a discussion activity around what this stage of the writing process is about.

Things to look out for when revising include content, voice, general fluency, transitions, use of evidence, clarity and coherence, and word choice.

It can also be a good idea for students to partner up into pairs and go through each other’s work together. As the old saying goes, ‘two heads are better than one’ and, in the early days at least, this will help students to use each other as sounding boards when making decisions on the revision process.

STAGE FOUR: THE WRITING PROCESS

CHECK YOUR WRITING

Editing is not a different thing than writing, it is itself an essential part of the writing process.

During the editing stage, students should keep an eagle eye out for conventional mistakes such as double spacing between words, spelling errors, and grammar and punctuation mistakes. 

While there are inbuilt spelling and grammar checkers in many of the most popular word processing programs, it is worth creating opportunities for students to practice their editing skills without the crutch of such technology on occasion.

Students should also take a last look over the conventions of the text type they are writing. 

Are the relevant headings and subheadings in place? Are bold words and captions in the right place? Is there consistency across the fonts used? Have diagrams been labelled correctly?

Editing can be a demanding process. There are lots of moving parts in it, and it often helps students to break things down into smaller, more manageable chunks.

Focused edits allow the student the opportunity to have a separate read-through to edit for each of the different editing points.

For example, the first run-through might look at structural elements such as the specific structural conventions of the text type concerned. Subsequent run-throughs could look at capitalization, grammar, punctuation , the indenting of paragraphs, formatting, spelling, etc.

Sometimes students find it hard to gain the necessary perspective to edit their work well. They’re simply too close to it, and it can be difficult for them to see what is on the paper rather than see what they think they have put down.

One good way to help students gain the necessary distance from their work is to have the student read their work out loud as they edit it.

Reading their work out loud forces the student to slow down the reading process and it forces them to pay more attention to what’s written on the page, rather than what’s in their head. 

It’s always helpful to get feedback from someone else. If time permits, get your students to ask a friend or other teacher to review their work and provide feedback. They may catch errors or offer suggestions your students haven’t considered.

All this gives the student a little more valuable time to catch the mistakes and other flaws in their work.

WRITING CHECKLISTS FOR ALL TEXT TYPES

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (92 Reviews)

EDITING TEACHING ACTIVITY

Students must have a firm understanding of what they’re looking to correct in the editing process to edit effectively. One effective way to ensure this understanding is to have them compile an Editing Checklist for use when they’re engaged in the editing process.

The Editing Checklist can be compiled as a whole-class shared writing activity. The teacher can scribe the students’ suggestions for inclusion on the checklist onto the whiteboard. This can then be typed up and printed off by all the students.

A fun and productive use of the checklist is for the students to use it in ‘editing pairs’. 

Each student is assigned an editing partner during the editing stage of a writing task. Each student goes through their partner’s, work using the checklist as a guide, and then gives feedback to the other partner. The partner, in turn, uses the feedback in the final edit of their work.

STAGE FIVE: THE WRITING PROCESS

HAND IN YOUR WRITING

Now, it’s time for our students’ final part of the writing process. This is when they hand in their work to their teacher – aka you !

At this point, students should have one final reread of their work to ensure it’s as close to their intentions as possible, and then, finally, they can submit their work.

Giving the work over to an audience, whether that audience comes in the form of a teacher marking an assignment, publishing work in print or online, or making a presentation to classmates, can be daunting. It’s important that students learn to see the act of submitting their work as a positive thing.

Though this is the final stage of the writing process, students should be helped to see it for all it is. It is another step in the journey towards becoming a highly-skilled writer. It’s a further opportunity for the student to get valuable feedback on where their skills are currently at and a signpost to help them to improve their work in the future.

When the feedback comes, whether that’s in the form of teacher comments, grades, reviews, etc it should be absorbed by the student as a positive part of this improvement process. 

Submitting TEACHING Activity

This activity is as much for the teacher as it is for the student.

Sometimes, our students think of feedback as a passive thing. The teacher makes some comments either in writing or orally and the student listens and carries on largely as before. We must help our students to recognize feedback as an opportunity for growth.

Feedback should be seen as a dialogue that helps our students to take control of their own learning. 

For this to be the case, students need to engage with the feedback they’ve been given, to take constructive criticisms on board, and to use these as a springboard to take action. 

One way to help students to do this lies in the way we format our feedback to our students. A useful format in this vein is the simple 2 Stars and a Wish . This format involves giving feedback that notes two specific areas of the work that the student did well and one that needs improvement. This area for improvement will provide a clear focus for the student to improve in the future. This principle of constructive criticism should inform all feedback.

It’s also helpful to encourage students to process detailed feedback by noting specific areas to focus on. This will give them some concrete targets to improve their writing in the future.

VIDEO TUTORIAL ON THE WRITING PROCESS

And there we have it. A straightforward and replicable process for our students to follow to complete almost any writing task.

But, of course, the real writing process is the ongoing one whereby our students improve their writing skills sentence-by-sentence and word-by-word over a whole lifetime.

OTHER GREAT ARTICLES RELATED TO THE WRITING PROCESS

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Mollie Reads

Book Lists, Book Reviews, and Editing Tips

November 9, 2022

The 5 Stages of the Writing Process | Tips from an Editor

This post may contain affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission if you purchase through my links—at no extra cost to you. Please read full disclosure for more information.

Before diving into the five stages of the writing process , it’s important to understand that no writing process is the same . 

Here, you won’t find rigid rules but more of a guideline.

Whether you’re curious about the stages of the writing process for college students or you’re a fiction writer, these 5 steps to the writing process and examples are relevant in academic writing, online SEO writing, creative writing, and more.

Stage 1: Brain Dump

In this prewriting stage, it’s all about brainstorming and early notes. Think of it as a stream-of-consciousness exercise with one goal in mind: Get your ideas out of your head and onto the paper/doc.

First you assess the big picture of what you’re trying to accomplish, then narrow your focus. 

Here are some helpful questions to ask in this prewriting step.

• Who are your readers? 
• What’s the main conflict or driving idea? 
• Who are the main and supporting characters? 
• What references are necessary? 
• Do you have an ending in mind? 
• What comparative titles would be helpful to study?
• If a book club discussed your book, what themes or main ideas would you want them to bring up? 

If you’re an academic writer, come up with your thesis—nothing has to be linear or complete. For some readers, this stage can be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be.

• Write lists
• Create word maps
• Make a storyboard
• Fill your “creative well” with quotes, inspiration, desired tone, etc.

For this stage in the writing process, allow yourself the freedom to write as if no one will read the final product. It’s not about how you organize the information—it’s about collecting the information and creating order later.

RELATED: Refill Your Well of Creativity | NaNoWriMo

Editor Tip: Create a Storyboard

What is storyboarding ? It’s a helpful exercise to visualize your story.

A brainstorming session can easily lead to storyboarding when you gather your ideas, goals, and references to map out a skeleton for your story—sketching scenes loosely so you can see from a high level where your novel is going.

Storyboarding is especially important for people writing picture books for children .

RELATED: Top 10 Board and Picture Books for Toddlers

Stage 2: Research

The type of writing, setting, and topic will determine how much research you do. After you’ve decided on your main ideas, you need to dive into your sources.

For academic writing, this is obviously a crucial step to adequately provide analysis and hold up your thesis, but all writing can benefit from a research stage. 

Maybe you include it organically in your writing process—your main character visits her aunt in Michigan and you need to quickly research what Michigan is like—but in general, the more research you do before the first draft, the better your writing will be.

Editor Tip: Research Similar Work

Not sure where to start? Try researching your genre and comparative titles. What made them work? What didn’t you like about them? How is the marketability for those books?

Obviously you want your work to be original, but just as an athlete would study a professional athlete’s techniques, a writer can study the storytelling techniques of another writer. 

This type of research can be incredibly helpful and may even spark new ideas before your first draft. 

Stage 3: Draft

Similar to the prewriting stage, this is the step in the writing process where you try not to censor yourself . You have your research and basic planning or outlines. 

Or, if you’re a pantser writing your first draft, you ideally have some ideas jotted down about how you want readers to feel when they read your book.

Editor Tip: Learn Your Workflow

How you write the first draft start to finish is up to you and your workflow. 

Some writers prefer to write some passages or chapters, read and revise it, write more, read and revise it, and so on until the book is complete. 

Some writers prefer to write without revisiting it until the very end. 

Other writers prefer to write certain parts of the story and then piece them all together. 

If you have a hard time getting stuck in revisions or you tend to struggle with perfectionism, I would strongly encourage you to write your first draft without reviewing it right away. 

Give yourself some distance before the self-editing phase.

RELATED: How to Become an Editor for Books in 2023

Stage 4: Revision

Once you have a first draft, no matter how rough it may be, it’s time for the revision stage in the writing process. This sometimes requires reworking at a sentence level and adding in appropriate transitions and better word choices. 

But overall, this is the stage to make sure everything works on a larger scale. 

• Does the chronological order make sense? 
• Do all of the characters and scenes advance the story? 
• Does anything in the plot need to be resolved? 
• Do you need to do more research in certain areas that feel a little thin, like worldbuilding? 

Editor Tip: Review to Revise

During the revision stage, go back to your early notes in the brainstorming stage. Did you accomplish what you wanted to? If not, what changed? 

Sometimes your story evolves into something else, and it can be a welcome surprise. Other times, you need to redirect. 

Stage 5: Editing

After the hard work of revisions followed by multiple drafts, it’s time to self-edit your book or project. There are five main levels of editing:

• Developmental (structural) editing
• Content or line editing
• Copy editing
• Proofreading
• Fact checking

Not sure how to edit your project and take your writing to the next level? This probably means you’re ready to put your work in the hands of a professional editor or proofreader . 

Understanding that you don’t know what you don’t know can be one of the best things to happen to your work. 

RELATED: Editor Talk | Four Types of Editing

Editor Tip: Find a Second Set of Eyes

It takes self-awareness to recognize you have blind spots, and a second set of (trained!) eyes at every stage of the publishing process is crucial. 

Learn more about how to self-edit your book and the differences between line editing vs. copyediting before you start the editing process.

This post was all about the 5 stages of the writing process, examples of questions to ask yourself at different steps in the writing process, and what you need to consider before getting started.

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The Writing Process Explained: From Outline to Final Draft

May 30, 2023 //  by  Lindsay Ann //   Leave a Comment

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Writing is a messy process. Rarely do writers pick up their pen or open a fresh Google Doc and write everything start to finish. To take the genesis of an idea, consider the rhetorical situation, form that idea into whatever genre and format it needs to take, polish it, and then publish it requires a writing process to help make the non-linear process of writing more manageable and productive. 

Student writers often struggle with this process. They think one submitted draft means the writing process is complete. The lack of engagement in the writing process can hold a student’s writing in that rough draft limbo land forever.  

Empowering students to have agency in their own writing process can inspire amazing writing, increase engagement, and improve students’ metacognition. 

Writing Process 5 Steps

The writing process as we know it has 5 distinct stages. 

• Prewriting, research & planning: In this stage, the writer is mapping out the writing.

This may include brainstorming ideas, storyboarding the narrative arc, conducting any necessary research and making an outline. Anything that happens before actually writing is considered prewriting.

• Drafting: In the drafting stage, writers are making their first attempt at getting the words on the page. In this stage the writing isn’t expected to be perfect because the writer will eventually go back and make necessary changes. The goal in this stage is simply to get the ideas on paper. The drafting stage tends to be where student writers think the writing process ends. For many reasons, they lack the understanding that this is a first attempt and will require some finessing.

 But writing is definitely not done here.

• Revising: When revising, writers go back into their draft and make changes for content . 

This looks like reordering sentences, adding sentences, deleting sentences altogether, reordering paragraphs, etc.

In this stage, writers are really ripping their drafts to shreds, taking out what isn’t working and replacing it with more beautiful and functional content in order to better get their message across and accomplish the purpose of their piece.

• Editing & proofreading: During the editing and proofreading phase, writers are carefully combing through the piece to make sure everything is correct . Word choice, sentence structure, rhythm, punctuation, clarity…getting all of it right matters. 

Sometimes in this stage it’s helpful to have an extra set of eyes on the draft because it can be difficult for us to always spot errors in our own writing.

• Publishing: Publishing can look very different for every writer. In a classroom, publishing may just mean, I’m finished and I’m going to turn this into my teacher now and she’s going to post it on the class Padlet . It could also mean sharing it with a collaborative writing group or submitting to the school’s literary magazine. It could also mean pitching the piece to a publication or presenting it to a community group. Basically, in this step, the writer is ready to show off their writing to the world. 

Teaching the Writing Process

Students need explicit instruction and time to practice the writing process. Time of course is one of our most precious resources in the classroom, so how can we make the most efficient use of it when teaching the writing process?

 Here’s what I’ve found to be particularly helpful:

Use the language of the writing process: Be intentional about using the language of the writing process in your daily agendas, lessons, and feedback. This way when you tell a student something like, “Today you need to focus on prewriting for your upcoming argumentative essay” or “This writing project needs some more revision” or “Do you have your draft completed?” they know what stage of the writing process they’re in and what they need to be doing in that stage of the process.

Teaching writing as a recursive process: The writing process is recursive. 

We (and by we I just mean all of us writers out there) can bounce back and forth from the drafting to the revision stage 15 times before moving on. We can also engage in deep and thoughtful prewriting only to abandon the idea before ever drafting because a better one came along and we decided to start prewriting and drafting for that idea. 

Breaking students of their bad habits is tough work, but helping students see writing as a recursive process will strengthen their final products and help them gain overall confidence in their writing. 

Write daily : Again, I know there are just not enough minutes in the day, but making writing a daily habit is so important. 

The writing process doesn’t just have to be used for long-form writing. 

If you use a daily quickwrite, journal prompt, or warmup, have students cycle through the writing process by jotting down a few ideas and making a quick outline before writing, writing, and then revising and editing before turning in or sharing with a shoulder partner. 

By being in the habit of writing every day, students will find their groove with their own process for writing and it will become second nature!

Model for students your process: Writing in front of students is Vulnerable (yes, with a capital V). I like writing and even I sometimes get nervous before putting my notebook under the document camera. But I try to make writing in front of my students something I do at least once weekly. I model for them my process, I think aloud what I’m going to write, how I want to write it, and they get to watch me write something, hate it, revise it , and cycle through the writing process. 

Status of the class for managing it all: Connor may need three days to organize his ideas in the prewriting stage while Ava only needs about 5 minutes to plan her writing and hit the ground running.

There is no time limit for being in a particular stage of the writing process (unless ya know, they’ve got their phone propped up behind their Chromebook watching Euphoria instead of writing, then we’ve got problems. But I digress…). 

Despite that knee jerk reaction to herd our students like cattle through the writing process, it needs to be differentiated for each writer in the room.

So how the heck do you manage that? 

Utilizing a status of the class for the writing process helps you keep track of where each writer in the room is and can also help you better plan small group or individual instruction and coaching.

 If you just do a quick Google search for the status of the class in the writing workshop, you’ll see approximately one million great ways to do it, but I particularly like the visual Stacy Shubitz at Two Writing Teachers created for her classroom.

Ideas for Brainstorming and Initiation

Check out these ideas to get students engaged in the writing process and shorten the time they stare at a blank page:

• Storyboarding: Draw out problems and solutions and organize them in a logical order.
• Alphabet boxes: See if you can come up with one idea for each letter of the alphabet.
• Heart Maps : Can be used for all writing genres!
• Keeping a writer’s notebook: Have all of your brilliant ideas living in one place. When a new one comes along, jot it down in the notebook!
• Pomodoro technique: Set a timer for 25 minutes and write. When the timer goes off, take a 5 minute break, reset the timer for 25 minutes, and continue writing.
• Stream of consciousness: Write whatever comes to mind about your spark of an idea for writing. When you’ve written all you have to say, use a reverse outline to organize your ideas and continue drafting or begin revising. 

Writing Process Stages

Break assignment up for students: Depending on your students’ skill levels, they may need you to break the assignment up into the stages of the writing process and assign one stage at a time.

Design cycle for STEM and PBL: The writing process is similar to the design cycle used for STEM and PBL ( yes, even engineers need to understand the writing process!).

Have students create their own goals and workflow calendar: In her book Project Based Writing , Liz Prather shares how she has students establish goals for their writing as part of the prewriting process as well as develop their own calendars using a reverse engineering process.

For example, if a student has 25 days and intends to create a poem about the changing seasons , they will need to break down the project into individual tasks and then map out on their calendar how many days they will need for each task. 

Wouldn’t it be amazing if by the end of the year students could move 100% autonomously through the writing process?!

Writing Process Revising v. Editing

What is the difference between revising and editing in the writing process? 

Revising focuses on content only. When you are revising your draft you may notice you are missing a comma or misspelled a word. That’s great! But in the revising stage, those observations don’t matter. Instead, you’re only focusing on making your mystery narrative more suspenseful or making your satirical article more humorous. 

You address those spelling, grammar, and mechanics errors in the editing stage.

Oftentimes in the classroom, the editing phase of the writing process is merely relegated to peer editing, which usually looks like a student’s paper getting shipped off to another student and being told to magically edit it without any guidance. 

Peer editing often gets a bad rap, but I have found that peer editing does have some redeeming qualities if explicitly taught and done correctly . 

Other Misconceptions

Sometimes misconceptions about the writing process hold us back from being our best possible teacher selves and hold our writers back from being their best possible writing selves. So as we wrap up, let’s debunk some of these common misconceptions. 

• Only writers who have problems in their writing need feedback: Ummmmm noooo. Even Jodi Piccoult has a literary agent and a team of editors at her publishing house to make sure her writing is perfect before being published. If it’s good enough for the New York Times bestselling author, it’s good enough for all of us.
• Every piece of writing needs to go through the full cycle: While it would be totally ideal to take every possible idea we ever have for a writing project and then brainstorm it, research it, outline it, draft, revise, edit, and then hit publish, that’s not really realistic. It’s okay to give up on a piece, change your mind on your idea, or have 6 drafts before it’s ready to be edited!
• You need to use the same process each time: The writing process is intended to be flexible. 

Now listen, I fully believe students have to learn the rules of writing (writing process included!) before they can learn to break them. But each student’s process doesn’t have to be the same.

If someone in your classroom needs to fully brainstorm each writing assignment using a storyboard before writing and you have another who needs to write a stream of consciousness before getting organized, it’s all good! Allow students to find their own way in the writing process. That’s where the really good, authentic writing lives! 

About Lindsay Ann

Lindsay has been teaching high school English in the burbs of Chicago for 19 years. She is passionate about helping English teachers find balance in their lives and teaching practice through practical feedback strategies and student-led learning strategies. She also geeks out about literary analysis, inquiry-based learning, and classroom technology integration. When Lindsay is not teaching, she enjoys playing with her two kids, running, and getting lost in a good book.

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Table of Contents

• Collaboration

Information Literacy

Writing process, the writing process – research on composing.

• © 2023 by Joseph M. Moxley - University of South Florida

The writing process refers to everything you do in order to complete a writing project. Over the last six decades, researchers have studied and theorized about how writers go about their work. They've found that the writing process can be seen in three main ways: (1) a series of steps or stages ; (2) a cognitive, problem-solving activity ; and (3) a creative, intuitive, organic, dialogic process that writers manage by listening to their inner speech and following their felt sense . Learn about scholarship on the writing process so you can understand how to break through writing blocks and find fluency as a writer, researcher, and thought leader.

Synonymous Terms

Composing process.

In writing studies , the writing process may also be known as the composing process . This may be due to the dramatic influence of Janet Emig’s (1971) dissertation, The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders . Emig’s research employed think-aloud protocols and case-study methods to explore the composing processes of high school students.

Creative Process

In creative writing and literature, the writing process may be known as the creative process .

In the arts and humanities the term creative process is reserved for artistic works, such as paintings, sculptures, performance art, films, and works of literature.

Related Concepts

Composition Studies ; Creativity; Felt Sense ; Growth Mindset ; Habits of Mind ; Intellectual Openness ; Professionalism and Work Ethic ; Resilience ; Self Regulation & Metacognition

What is the Writing Process?

Research on composing processes conducted over the past 60 years has led to three major distinct ways of defining and conceptualizing the writing process:

• prewriting , invention , research , collaboration , planning , designing , drafting , rereading , organizing , revising , editing , proofreading , and sharing or publishing
• The writing process refers to cognitive, problem-solving strategies
• The writing process refers to the act of making composing decisions based on nonrational factors such as embodied knowledge , felt sense , inner speech, and intuition.

1. The writing process refers to writing process steps

The writing process is often characterized as a series of steps or stages. During the elementary and middle-school years, teachers define the writing process simply as prewriting , drafting , revising , and editing . Later, in high-school and college, as writing assignments become more challenging, teachers introduce additional writing steps: invention , research , collaboration , designing , organizing , proofreading , and sharing or proofreading.

2. The writing process refers to Problem-Solving Strategies

As an alternative to imagining the writing process to be a series of steps or stages that writers work through in linear manner, Linda Flower and John Hayes suggested in 1977 that writing should be thought of as a “thinking problem,” a “problem-solving process,” a “cognitive problem solving process,” or a “goal-directed thinking process.”

3. The writing process refers to the act of making composing decisions based on flow, felt sense and other elements of embodied knowledge

For some writers, viewing the writing process as a series of steps or problems feels to mechanistic, impersonal and formulaic. Rather than view that the writing process to be a series of writing steps or problem solving strategies , Sondra Perl , an English professor, suggests that composing is largely a process of listening to one’s felt sense — one’s “bodily awareness of a situation or person or event:

“A felt sense doesn’t come to you in the form of thoughts or words or other separate units, but as a single (though often puzzling and very complex) bodily feeling”. (Gendlin 1981, 32-33)

What are Writing Process Steps?

In elementary and middle schools in the U.S., the writing process is often simplified and presented at four or five key steps: prewriting , writing , revising , and editing –and sometimes and publishing or sharing . As students progress through school, the writing process is presented in increasingly complex ways. By high school, teachers present “the writing process steps” as

• Proofreading
• Sharing – Publishing

Is there one perfect way to work with the writing process?

People experience and define the writing process differently, according to their historical period, literacy history, knowledge of writing tools, media , genres — and more. One of the takeaways from research on composing is that we’ve learned writers develop their own idiosyncratic approaches to getting the work done. When it comes to how we all develop, research , and communicate information , we are all special snowflakes. For example,

• Hemingway was known for standing while he wrote at first light each morning.
• Truman Capote described himself as a “completely horizontal author.” He wrote lying down, in bed or on a couch, with a cigarette and coffee handy.
• Hunter S. Thompson wrote through the nights, mixing drinking and partying with composing
• J.K. Rowling tracked the plot lines for her Harry Potter novels in a data.
• Maya Angelou would lock herself away in a hotel room from 6:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. so she has no distractions.

Furthermore, the steps of the writing process a writer engages in vary from project to project. At times  composing  may be fairly simple. Some situations  require little planning ,  research ,  revising  or  editing , such as

• a grocery list, a to-do list, a reflection on the day’s activity in a journal
• documents you routinely write, such as the professor’s letter of recommendation, a bosses’ performance appraisal, a ground-water engineer’s contamination report.

Over time, writers develop their own unique writing processes. Through trial and error, people can learn what works for them.

Composing  may be especially challenging

• when you are unfamiliar with the  topic ,  genre ,  medium ,  discourse community
• when the thesis/research question/topic  is complicated yet needs to be explained simply
• when you are endeavoring to synthesize other’s ideas and research
• when you don’t have the time you need to perfect the document.

What are the main factors that affect how writers compose documents?

Writers adjust their writing process in response to

• Writers assess the importance of the exigency, the call to write, before commiting time and resources to launching
• the writers access to information
• What they know about the canon, genre, media and rhetorical reasoning
• their writerly background
• the audience
• Writers assess the importance of the exigency, the call to write, before committing time and resources to working on the project.

Why does the writing process matter?

The writing processes that you use to compose documents play a significant role in determining whether your communications are successful. If you truncate your writing process, you are likely to run out of the time you need to write with clarity and authority .

• Studying the writing processes of successful writers can introduce you to new rhetorical moves, genres , and composing processes. Learning about the composing processes of experienced writers can help you learn how to adjust your rhetorical stance and your writing styles to best accomplish your purpose .
• By examining your writing processes and the writing processes of others, you can learn how to better manage your work and the work of other authors and teams.
• By recognizing that writing is a skill that can be developed through practice and effort, you can become more resilient and adaptable in your writing endeavors.

Do experienced writers compose in different ways than inexperienced writers?

Yes. Experienced writers engage in more substantive, robust writing processes than less experienced writers.

• Experienced writers tend to have more rhetorical knowledge and a better understanding of composing steps and strategies than inexperienced writers.
• Experienced writers tend to be more willing than inexperienced writers to make substantive changes in a draft, often making changes that involve rethinking the meaning of a text. Some professional writers may revise a document hundreds of times before pushing send or publishing it.
• Experienced writers engage in revision as an act of internal conversation, a form of inner speech that they have with themselves and an imagined other–the internalized target audience. In contrast, inexperienced writers tend to confuse editing for revision . They tend to make only a few edits to their initial drafts, focusing primarily on surface-level changes such as correcting grammar, spelling, or punctuation errors.
• Experienced writers are adept at working collaboratively, leveraging the strengths of team members and effectively coordinating efforts to produce a cohesive final product. Inexperienced writers may struggle with collaboration, communication, and division of labor within a writing team

What is Process Pedagogy?

Process pedagogy, which is also known as the process movement, emerged in the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In The Making of Knowledge in Composition , Steve North (1987) links the emergence of process pedagogy to

• Sputnik and America’s concern it was falling behind Russia
• the GI Bill and the changing demographics of undergraduate students in the post-war era.

Additionally, process pedagogy emerged in response to dissatisfaction with traditional, product-oriented approaches to teaching writing. In the current-traditional paradigm of writing, the focus of the classroom was on “the composed product rather than the composing process; the analysis of discourse into words, sentences, and paragraphs; the classification of discourse into description, narration, exposition, and argument; the strong concern with usage (syntax, spelling, punctuation) and with style (economy, clarity, emphasis)” (Young, 1978, p. 25).

The process movement reflected a sea change on the part of middle schools, high schools, and universities in the U.S. Traditionally, classroom instruction focused on analysis and critique of the great works of literature: “The student is (a) exposed to the formal descriptive categories of rhetoric (modes of argument –definition, cause and effect, etc. — and modes of discourse — description, persuasion, etc.), (b) offered good examples (usually professional ones) and bad examples (usually his/her own) and (c) encouraged to absorb the features of a socially approved style, with emphasis on grammar and usage. We help our students analyze the product, but we leave the process of writing up to inspiration” (Flower and Hayes, 1977, p. 449).

In contrast to putting the focus of class time on analyzing great literary works,  the canon , process pedagogy calls for teachers to put the emphasis on the students’ writing:

• Students need help with prewriting , invention , research , collaboration , writing , designing , revising , organizing , editing , proofreading , and sharing
• Teachers do not comment on grammar and style matters in early drafts. Instead, they focus on global perspectives . They prioritize the flow of ideas and expression over correctness in grammar and mechanics.
• Students engage in prewriting and invention exercises to discover and develop new ideas
• Students repeatedly revise their works in response to self-critique , peer review , and critiques from teachers
• Teachers should provide constructive feedback throughout the writing process.

What does “teach the process and not the product mean”?

“Teach the process not the product ” is both the title of a Donald Murray (1972) article and the mantra of the writing process movement, which emerged during the 1960s.

The mantra to teach the process not the product emerged in response to the research and scholarship conducted by Donald Murray, Janet Emig, Peter Elbow, Ann Berthoff, Nancy Sommers, Sondra Perl, John Hayes and Linda Flower.

What does it mean to describe the writing process as recursive ?

The term  recursive writing process  simply means that writers jump around from one activity to another when  composing . For instance, when first drafting a document, a writer may pause to reread something she wrote. That might trigger a new idea that shoots her back to Google Scholar or some other database suitable for  strategic searching .

How do researchers study the writing process?

The writing process is a major subject of study of researchers and scholars in the fields of composition studies , communication, writing studies , and AI (artificial intelligence).

The writing process  is something of a black box: investigators can see  inputs  (e.g., time on task) or  outputs  (e.g.,  written discourse ), yet they cannot  empirically observe  the internal workings of the writer’s mind. At the end of the day investigators have to jump from what they observe to making informed guesses about what is really going on in the writer. Even if investigators ask a writer to talk out loud about what they are thinking as they compose , the investigators can only hear what the writer is saying: they cannot see the internal machinations associated with the writer’s thoughts. If a writer goes mute, freezes, and just stares blankly at the computer screen, investigators cannot really know what’s going on. They can only speculate about how the brain functions.

Research Methods

To study or theorize about the writing process, investigators may use a variety of research methods .

Doherty, M. (2016, September 4). 10 things you need to know about banyan trees. Under the Banyan. https://underthebanyan.blog/2016/09/04/10-things-you-need-to-know-about-banyan-trees/

Emig, J. (1967). On teaching composition: Some hypotheses as definitions. Research in The Teaching of English, 1(2), 127-135. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED022783.pdf

Emig, J. (1971). The composing processes of twelfth graders (Research Report No. 13). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Emig, J. (1983). The web of meaning: Essays on writing, teaching, learning and thinking. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc.

Ghiselin, B. (Ed.). (1985). The Creative Process: Reflections on the Invention in the Arts and Sciences . University of California Press.

Hayes, J. R., & Flower, L. (1980). Identifying the Organization of Writing Processes. In L. W. Gregg, & E. R. Steinberg (Eds.), Cognitive Processes in Writing: An Interdisciplinary Approach (pp. 3-30). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.  

Hayes, J. R. (2012). Modeling and remodeling writing. Written Communication, 29(3), 369-388. https://doi: 10.1177/0741088312451260

Hayes, J. R., & Flower, L. S. (1986). Writing research and the writer. American Psychologist, 41(10), 1106-1113. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.41.10.1106

Leijten, Van Waes, L., Schriver, K., & Hayes, J. R. (2014). Writing in the workplace: Constructing documents using multiple digital sources. Journal of Writing Research, 5(3), 285–337. https://doi.org/10.17239/jowr-2014.05.03.3

Lundstrom, K., Babcock, R. D., & McAlister, K. (2023). Collaboration in writing: Examining the role of experience in successful team writing projects. Journal of Writing Research, 15(1), 89-115. https://doi.org/10.17239/jowr-2023.15.01.05

National Research Council. (2012). Education for Life and Work: Developing Transferable Knowledge and Skills in the 21st Century . Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.https://doi.org/10.17226/13398.

North, S. M. (1987). The making of knowledge in composition: Portrait of an emerging field. Boynton/Cook Publishers.

Murray, Donald M. (1980). Writing as process: How writing finds its own meaning. In Timothy R. Donovan & Ben McClelland (Eds.), Eight approaches to teaching composition (pp. 3–20). National Council of Teachers of English.

Murray, Donald M. (1972). “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product.” The Leaflet, 11-14

Perry, S. K. (1996).  When time stops: How creative writers experience entry into the flow state  (Order No. 9805789). Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (304288035). https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/when-time-stops-how-creative-writers-experience/docview/304288035/se-2

Rohman, D.G., & Wlecke, A. O. (1964). Pre-writing: The construction and application of models for concept formation in writing (Cooperative Research Project No. 2174). East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University.

Rohman, D. G., & Wlecke, A. O. (1975). Pre-writing: The construction and application of models for concept formation in writing (Cooperative Research Project No. 2174). U.S. Office of Education, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Sommers, N. (1980). Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers. College Composition and Communication, 31(4), 378-388. doi: 10.2307/356600

Vygotsky, L. (1962).  Thought and language.  (E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar, Eds.). MIT Press.  https://doi.org/10.1037/11193-000

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Stages of the Writing Process

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Writing can’t be done without going through certain stages. All writers go through their own unique writing processes before they make their final drafts. Usually, writers start with choosing topics and brainstorming, and then they may outline their papers, and compose sentences and paragraphs to make a rough draft. After they make a rough draft, writers may begin revising their work by adding more sentences, or removing sentences. Writers may then edit their rough draft by changing words and sentences that are grammatically incorrect or inappropriate for a topic.

Brainstorming

Before you start writing, you will think about what to write, or how to write. This is called, brainstorming . When you brainstorm for ideas, you will try to come up with as many ideas as you can. Don't worry about whether or not they are good or bad ideas. You can brainstorm by creating a list of ideas that you came up with, or drawing a map and diagram, or just writing down whatever you can think of without thinking about grammar. Think of this like the erratic thunder and lightning that comes from a thunderstorm.

Next, you may want to outline your paper based on the ideas you came up with while you were brainstorming. This means that you will think about the structure of your paper so that you can best deliver your ideas, and meet the requirements of writing assignments. You will usually outline your paper by beginning with its three major parts: introduction, body, and conclusion. The specific structure of each essay may vary from assignment to assignment. Many writers call this a skeleton unto which you develop or “flesh out” the paper. Once you have the skeleton in place, you can start thinking about how to add additional detail to it.

Rough Draft

Your professors or instructors will often require you to submit a rough draft of your paper. This usually means that your work is still in progress. In the rough draft, readers want to see if you have a clear direction in your paper. When you are required to submit a rough draft, it doesn't need to be perfect, but it does need to be complete. That means, you shouldn't be missing any of the major parts of the paper. For more information on drafting and revising your work, watch our Drafting and Revising video.

Revise and Edit your writing

What is the difference between revise and edit ?

Revision lets you look at your paper in terms of your topic, your ideas, and your audience. You may add more paragraphs or remove paragraphs to better fit into a given genre or topic. In a word, revising means that you organize your writing better in a way that your audience can understand your writing better. You may want to read our resource on basic rhetorical elements to help guide your revision.

Editing typically means that you go over your writing to make sure that you do not have any grammatical errors or strange phrases that make it difficult for your readers to understand what you are trying to say. In other words, editing means that you take care of minor errors in your writing. This is a lot like polishing your writing.

Polish your writing

We often hear professors or instructors say that you need to “ polish your writing .” What do you mean by polish ?

The word polish originally meant to make something smooth and shiny, as in “she polished her leather shoes.” In writing, polish can mean to improve or perfect, or refine a piece of writing by getting rid of minor errors. In other words, when your professors or instructors say, “polish your writing,” it means that you should go over your writing and make sure you do not have any errors in grammar, spelling, punctuation, and to make sure that you do not have any sentences that do not make sense.

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The Writing Process

Discovery/investigation.

The first step in writing a successful paper in college requires an active engagement with your sources. Simply reading a primary source for content is no longer sufficient. The question should no longer be “What happened?” but rather “Why did that happen? What does that say about the character(s)/plot?” Make notes of your thoughts and ideas as you read.

Once the writer has finished an active reading of the primary source, it may be necessary to obtain secondary sources to back up the thesis. If your research yields books, remember that it is not necessary to read the entire book. You can either look for a chapter title that you believe will have information pertinent to your paper, or look at the index for terms that you will be discussing.

Peer-reviewed journals available online will be your most commonly used secondary resource. Use the online searches through the Knight-Capron Library, but remember that other search engines, such as Google Scholar, can yield results.

Prewriting is the step in which tools such as free writing, brainstorming, outlining, or clustering are used. In prewriting, no idea is too off topic or too strange. It is these sometimes dissociative ideas that can lead you to a paper topic that you never would have considered.

Though the common perception is that there is nothing that hasn’t been written about before, if you allow yourself to think outside the box, you can find a way of looking at an old topic through new eyes.

It is also during prewriting that the writer needs to make a decision about audience. Asking questions like: “Who is going to read my paper?”, “What is the purpose of this paper?”, and “Why are they going to read my paper?” will help you set your audience.

The simple answer to these questions is “My professor” and “Because they assigned it.” They are not the true answers. It could be that your paper needs to be geared towards elementary level students or participants in a seminar or peers at a conference. The language and tone for either of those audiences would be very different.

Drafting is the beginning of “writing” your paper. It is important to remember that in drafting you should already have a thesis idea to guide your writing. Without a thesis, your writing will be prone to drift, making it harder to frame after the fact.

In drafting, the writer should use materials created in the prewriting stage and any notes taken in discovery and investigation to frame and build body paragraphs.

Many writers will tackle their body paragraphs first instead of beginning with an introduction (especially if you are not sure of the exact direction of your paper). Beginning with body paragraphs will allow you to work through your ideas without feeling restricted by a specific thesis, but be prepared to delete paragraphs that don’t fit.

Afterwards, create an opening paragraph (with an appropriate revised thesis) that reflects the body of your essay.

There are two different scopes of revision: global and local.

Global Revision

Global revision involves focusing on higher order concerns. We frequently think of higher order concerns as involving audience, purpose, thesis claims, development (and support), and organization.

When looking your paper over with global revision in mind, ask yourself the following questions:

• What does my audience already know about this topic, and what do they need to know? Have I included information from sources that my audience values?
• Is the purpose of my paper clear? Does my thesis claim reflect the purpose, and does it fully capture my paper’s content?
• Have I offered enough supporting evidence in my supporting paragraphs? Have I effectively quoted, paraphrased, and/or summarized my sources? Have I provided appropriate in-text citations and entries in my works cited or reference page?
• Have I effectually discussed my evidence? Have I put my sources into context for the reader (perhaps by using signal phrases), and I have discussed the evidence I have used so that the reader understands its relevance/importance? Have I quoted sources but have failed to discuss the quotes?
• Have I organized my paper in a logical manner? Did I go from least important/shocking points to most important/shocking points?

Many also believe that global revision involves looking for issues like cohesion and the overall progression of your paper. If your paragraphs jump from point to point without a clear connection between the points, there is an issue with cohesion. If your paragraphs contain too many points, this is also an issue. Ideally, a paragraph contains one point that is thoroughly discussed and supported with credible evidence.

Lastly, If your paper has paragraphs that do not flow into each other, but change topic abruptly only to return to a previous thought later, your paper has poor cohesion.

A paper that includes smooth transitions is significantly easier to read and understand. It is preferable to keep all like thoughts together and to arrange your paragraphs in such a way that your argument builds, rather than laying everything out with equal weight.

Though the blueprint for your paper is in the thesis, the end result of your argument should not come early in the paper, but at the end. Allow the supporting paragraphs to build to your conclusions.

Local Revision

Local issues involve looking for clarity in sentences, ensuring coherence with your ideas. The greatest asset to avoiding and fixing local issues is to use varied sentence structure and to avoid using the same words repeatedly. Repeating the same sentence structure can make your paper feel mechanical and make an interesting topic feel boring.

Local revision also involves being mindful of lower order concerns, such as sentence structure, word choice, grammar, and spelling.

The final stage in writing a paper requires a review of what you have written. In this last read of your paper, you should look for any grammar, spelling, or punctuation errors that have slipped through the cracks during the revising stage, or that were introduced in your revisions.

Reading your paper aloud, or asking a friend to read your paper to you is a good way to catch errors. Often if you read your own paper, especially out loud, you can catch errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

Though this step seems minor within the process of writing, it is an easy way to prevent the loss of points over simple mistakes.

Formatting, Inner-text Citation, and Works Cited

The formatting required for your paper will change depending on the field of your topic. Generally, the sciences and business and economics use APA or CSE formatting. English, and other humanities will use MLA, and History uses Chicago. The appearance of inner-text citations, and Works cited page will all be affected by these different formats.

Consult your syllabus or ask your professor to learn what format you should use. Guides for APA, Chicago, and MLA are available online .

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Implementing the Writing Process

About this Strategy Guide

This strategy guide explains the writing process and offers practical methods for applying it in your classroom to help students become proficient writers.

Research Basis

Strategy in practice, related resources.

The writing process—prewriting, drafting, revising and editing, rewriting, publishing—mirrors the way proficient writers write. In using the writing process, your students will be able to break writing into manageable chunks and focus on producing quality material. The final stage, publishing, ensures that students have an audience. Students can even coach each other during various stages of the process for further emphasis on audience and greater collaboration during editing.  Studies show that students who learn the writing process score better on state writing tests than those who receive only specific instruction in the skills assessed on the test. This type of authentic writing produces lifelong learners and allows students to apply their writing skills to all subjects. Success in writing greatly depends on a student’s attitude, motivation, and engagement. The writing process takes these elements into account by allowing students to plan their writing and create a publishable, final draft of their work of which they can be proud. It addresses students’ need for a real audience and to take the time to draft and redraft their work. You can help your students think carefully about each stage of their writing by guiding them through the writing process repeatedly throughout the year and across various content areas.

The writing process involves teaching students to write in a variety of genres, encouraging creativity, and incorporating writing conventions. This process can be used in all areas of the curriculum and provides an excellent way to connect instruction with state writing standards. The following are ways to implement each step of the writing process:

• Prewriting—This step involves brainstorming, considering purpose and goals for writing, using graphic organizers to connect ideas, and designing a coherent structure for a writing piece. For kindergarten students, scribbling and invented spelling are legitimate stages of writing development; the role of drawing as a prewriting tool becomes progressively less important as writers develop. Have young students engage in whole-class brainstorming to decide topics on which to write. For students in grades 3-5, have them brainstorm individually or in small groups with a specific prompt, such as, “Make a list of important people in your life,” for example. Online graphic organizers might help upper elementary students to organize their ideas for specific writing genres during the prewriting stage. Examples are the Essay Map , Notetaker , or Persuasion Map .
• Drafting—Have students work independently at this stage. Confer with students individually as they write, offering praise and suggestions while observing areas with which students might be struggling and which might warrant separate conference time or minilessons.
• Revising and Editing—Show students how to revise specific aspects of their writing to make it more coherent and clear during minilessons. You can model reading your own writing and do a think aloud about how you could add more details and make it clearer. Teach students to reread their own work more than once as they think about whether it really conveys what they want to their reader. Reading their work aloud to classmates and other adults helps them to understand what revisions are needed. Your ELLs will develop greater language proficiency as they collaborate with their peers when revising.
• Rewriting—Have students incorporate changes as they carefully write or type their final drafts.

Rubrics help to make expectations and grading procedures clear, and provide a formative assessment to guide and improve your instruction. The Sample Writing Rubric , for example, can be used for upper elementary students.

As you work with your students to implement the writing process, they will begin to master writing and take it into all aspects of life. Peer review, with clear guidelines for students to give feedback on each other’s work, motivates students, allows them to discuss their writing with their peers, and makes the work load a little lighter for you. The Peer Edit with Perfection! PowerPoint Tutorial is a useful tool to teach students how to peer review and edit. You can also have students can edit their own work using a checklist, such as the Editing Checklist . Editing is when students have already revised content but need to correct mistakes in terms of spelling, grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, and word choice. Use minilessons, small-group lessons, or individual conferencing if necessary to make sure that students have made thoughtful changes to their writing content before moving on to the final draft.

• Publishing—Encourage students to publish their works in a variety of ways, such as a class book, bulletin board, letters to the editor, school newsletter, or website. The ReadWriteThink Printing Press tool is useful for creating newspapers, brochures, flyers and booklets. Having an authentic audience beyond the classroom gives student writing more importance and helps students to see a direct connection between their lives and their literacy development.
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It's not easy surviving fourth grade (or third or fifth)! In this lesson, students brainstorm survival tips for future fourth graders and incorporate those tips into an essay.

Students are encouraged to understand a book that the teacher reads aloud to create a new ending for it using the writing process.

While drafting a literary analysis essay (or another type of argument) of their own, students work in pairs to investigate advice for writing conclusions and to analyze conclusions of sample essays. They then draft two conclusions for their essay, select one, and reflect on what they have learned through the process.

The Essay Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to organize and outline their ideas for an informational, definitional, or descriptive essay.

The Persuasion Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to map out their arguments for a persuasive essay or debate.

The Stapleless Book can be used for taking notes while reading, making picture books, collecting facts, or creating vocabulary booklets . . . the possibilities are endless!

Students examine the different ways that they write and think about the role writing plays in life.

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