The idea-gathering stage is a magical place, full of imagination and inspiration.  I haven’t met a writer yet who doesn’t relish the free flowing ease that the term “invention stage” connotes.  Invention is fun.  This attitude may be partly to blame for the planning stage’s bad rap.  As we transition from invention to planning, we think, well, invention was great while it lasted.  Now, the fun’s over.  It’s time to get to work.  Sigh.

But is invention as easy as we like to think?  The purpose of the invention stage is to discover all the things that are available to say about a given topic. 

I suspect that writers think of invention as easy because they stop gathering ideas when they don’t feel like gathering them anymore.  In the other stages, however, you can’t just declare a stage complete.  If you only have half an outline, for example, you can’t say that you are finished with the planning stage.  Similarly, if you don’t have an introduction, body, and conclusion, you’re not finished drafting.  So why should you be able to stop inventing if you get stuck?

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 So, you have a writing task to complete.  You have diligently applied your favorite idea-generating strategies: brainstorming, freewriting, looping, and idea mapping.  If your writing task is in a professional context, you may also have notes from meetings with your boss, clients, or colleagues.  If you’re writing in an academic context, you will likely have an assignment from your teacher or professor. 

A lot of writers tend to skip from the idea-gathering phase to an outlining process.  Other writers tend to follow idea gathering with a rough plan - a quick list, perhaps - and then proceed directly to drafting (If this describes you, you may enjoy my planning ideas for the anti-outliners: Don’t Outline — Strategize!) But dashing from the invention phase to the planning phase without a period of reflection may not be the best course of action.  You have an important set of decisions to make between the invention and planning phases.

Of course, I am not advocating a sustained period of naval gazing.  I stand by my earlier assertion that writers write.  But in order to write well, and in order to establish habits that will help you to write better, it’s useful to remember the value of reflection.  Reflection makes it easier to write mindfully, and writing mindfully is writing productively. 

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 This is part five in a five-part series.

The fifth installment in “Getting Your Writing to Flow” (in case you’ve missed them, here are parts one, two, three, and four) focuses on an issue that is at once more global and more local than any of the others we have covered.  It’s tone, and it’s at the very heart of your work as a writer and of your writing’s flow.  If your tone doesn’t work, your writing won’t work.

Tone is the writer’s emotional attitude toward the topic at hand.  (In the case of fiction, it would be the speaker’s attitude, which the writer may or may not personally endorse.)

A writer’s tone is sometimes paralleled with a speaker’s tone of voice.  However, a writer’s voice is something slightly different.  A writer’s voice is analogous to a personality, which is consistent day-to-day and unique to that person. 

I will use blogs to illustrate the difference between voice and tone.  Each blog in my Blogroll (at right) has a distinct voice that unifies all of the posts the blogger has written.  Voice is a perspective, a way of looking at the world, and many times a blog is successful because many readers enjoy that writer’s unique take on life.  Within a single successful blog, however, posts can have many different tones.  Depending on the topic and the writer’s thoughts and feelings about it, the tone could be passionate, content, defiant, pleading, assertive or a thousand others.

Some tones will glue your readers to the page; others will drive them away.  So, what do you need to consider to set the perfect tone for your topic?  I’m glad you asked.

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 This is part four in the five-part series “Getting Your Writing To Flow.”

The previous entries in this series focused on ways that structure affects flow.  I provided tips for structuring sentences and paragraphs (both a paragraph’s topic/wrap-up sentence and its mid-paragraph details) to improve flow.  In this post, I’ll focus on the choices a writer makes about which words and phrases he or she uses to construct sentences: a writer’s style.

When writers get to a certain comfort level with their writing, they sometimes get into bad habits.  For these writers, writing has become a tool that they use without thinking rather than an exciting, fresh experience of expression.  When that happens - and I think it happens to all of us at some point - we stop consciously making decisions about how we put sentences together in the name of “getting it done.”

As a result, a writer’s style often slides from the clear, albeit simplistic, style of the novice to the inexact, tortuous style of the apprentice.  Not “one step forward, two steps back,” exactly - more like one step forward and one step sideways. 

The two undesirable aspects of style that we will consider today are vagueness and wordiness.  The following tips will help you reframe the way you think about sentence construction so you can seek and destroy vague and wordy phrasing.  (For a related post, check out On Removing Weakifiers.)

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 This is part two of a five-part series.

Yesterday, I began a detailed examination of what makes writing flow.  The most important thing to understand about flow is that it results from looking at your writing from your reader’s perspective. 

This exhortation - to look at things from the reader’s perspective rather than your own - seems obvious to the point of truism.  By definition, writers write and readers read.  Thus, if you’re writing at all, you’re writing for readers, right?  Wrong.

The default position for a writer is writing for himself or herself.  It can be an uncomfortable process akin to an out-of-body experience to pull yourself out of your own perspective and look at things from your reader’s viewpoint.  The more you try to do it, however, the more flexible your perspective will become. 

How do details contribute to flow?  Providing an appropriate amount of detail helps to clarify the conceptual ligatures that bind your writing together. 

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 Yesterday, we discussed recalibrating the way we as writers think about the planning stage of the writing process.  I suggested that we think of it as strategizing, just as a general would plan the strategy for a military engagement.

You’re in your war room, and you have your raw material at hand: maps, troop data, enemy intel, etc.  How do you begin to strategize?

The first thing to do is to determine the victory conditions for this engagement.  In military terms, how will you know when you’ve succeeded?  In writing terms, how will you know you have finished writing? 

To determine this, you must clarify your purpose for writing.  Why are you writing?  What do you hope to achieve?  At the broadest level, writing can be classified by its purpose: to inform, to persuade, or to entertain, for example.  Many writers don’t step back to consider their writing’s true purpose, and they end up with muddy, unfocused drafts as a result.  

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 This is part one of a two-part series.

It’s easy to love the early stages of writing in which you’re generating ideas.  The only rule of brainstorming is that all ideas are acceptable:  this means that you can feel legitimately productive while cranking out line after line of crackpot schemes and off-the-wall rants.  If the “cluster,” “web,” or “bubble” methods work for you, even better.  You can place your crackpot schemes in spatial relation to each other until they look like some futuristic blueprint.  No wonder we love this early stage.  Even the name for this part of the process - invention - sounds cool.  

It’s also easy to feel good about the writing process’s later stages: drafting, revision, and editing, although they don’t generate the same enthusiasm as invention does.  Many writers view these later stages as “real writing” because they’re actually putting words on a page in sentence and paragraph form.  In other words, the writer has something intelligible to show for the blood, sweat, and tears he or she put into the project.  Once a writer has a draft, the hard work seems “worth it.” 

One stage of the writing process, however, seems to be perpetually left out in the cold.  This stage is grudgingly completed and often ignored.  It’s the stage we love to hate.  It’s the planning stage.  However, if we recalibrate the way we think about and use planning in our writing, planning can be a source of inspiration rather than dread.

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 One reason I love personal productivity/life development/organization blogs is that they provide some great tips for overcoming procrastination.  The blogosphere is full of them, and they’re great fun to read.  (Check out Leo Babuta’s Top 20 Motivation Hacks - An Overview at Zen Habits or Lifehack’s 11 Tips for Nuking Laziness Without Becoming a Workaholic for examples, but this is truly the tip of the iceberg when it comes to productivity how-tos.)

Plus, they’re a great way to feel like I’m doing something productive when I’m really avoiding larger tasks.

…hey…wait a second…

This post is not about overcoming procrastination. It’s about getting a draft started.  I make this distinction at the outset because even if you’re not a chronic procrastinator, it can be challenging to get started drafting.  Whether you’re a potter or a sculptor, writing is hard work.  In fact, it can seem positively Herculean.  This goes double for the procrastinators out there.

Here are some tips that have worked for me, or for writers I know.  More importantly, I have not come across these tips in other personal productivity/writing blogs.  (If you have posted something similar, let me know in the comments section.  I’d be happy to link to it.)  I hope you’ll find something here that you haven’t tried yet.

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 What is the difference between a novice writer and an experienced writer?  It’s not the ideas, talent or creativity: an inexperienced writer can have a great idea just as a pro can.  As I have said before, writing is a skill, not an inherent attribute. 

In many ways, the difference can be boiled down to this:  novices start writing at the first word of the introduction and continue to the last word of the conclusion.  But proficient writers have started writing long before they put a sentence down and, more importantly, they continue writing long after.

In other words, experienced writers know that writing is not an act.  Rather, writing is a multi-step process.  What the novice writers think of as “writing,” proficient writers know to be neither more nor less than “drafting.”  

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