Monday, February 12, 2007
Pre-Writing
I just finished editing one of the books for DreamTime Publishing's Open Your Heart series, specifically Open Your Heart with Writing, which will be coming out in August. (Hint: Watch for it! Buy it!)
The author, Neil Rosen, talks at some length about what could best be called "pre-writing" -- he says that by the time he sits down at his computer (what we used to call "putting pen to paper"), he already has a sense of where his story or essay is going. It's been happening in his mind for a long time before he feels that it's time to capture it.
It's an interesting concept.
I remember that in college we were encouraged to prewrite as well. "Know what you have to say before you say it," was the adage, which actually isn't bad advice for all of life -- have an idea of what you're going to say before you open your mouth. It might save us all some embarrassing moments.
It also helps you, as a writer, have a sense of what your props need to be. If you're thinking about writing a novel set during the Second World War, for example, it behooves you to do a little research on daily life during that time period, hopefully before you make a gaffe in your writing and bring something anachronistic into the picture.
Knowing ahead of time what you're going to say can make your own first edit of your work a great deal less painful, as you'll have already organized your thoughts, background, characters and so on around the theme or plot that you've devised.
This doesn't mean that you won't still write yourself into a corner sometimes -- we all do. And it doesn't mean that you can't listen to your characters as they guide you in a direction that may be different from what you'd planned. But for a good overall sense of what you're doing, pre-writing can be a great tool. And then you'll be ... beyond the elements of style!
Jeannette Cézanne
Customline Wordware, Inc.
The author, Neil Rosen, talks at some length about what could best be called "pre-writing" -- he says that by the time he sits down at his computer (what we used to call "putting pen to paper"), he already has a sense of where his story or essay is going. It's been happening in his mind for a long time before he feels that it's time to capture it.
It's an interesting concept.
I remember that in college we were encouraged to prewrite as well. "Know what you have to say before you say it," was the adage, which actually isn't bad advice for all of life -- have an idea of what you're going to say before you open your mouth. It might save us all some embarrassing moments.
It also helps you, as a writer, have a sense of what your props need to be. If you're thinking about writing a novel set during the Second World War, for example, it behooves you to do a little research on daily life during that time period, hopefully before you make a gaffe in your writing and bring something anachronistic into the picture.
Knowing ahead of time what you're going to say can make your own first edit of your work a great deal less painful, as you'll have already organized your thoughts, background, characters and so on around the theme or plot that you've devised.
This doesn't mean that you won't still write yourself into a corner sometimes -- we all do. And it doesn't mean that you can't listen to your characters as they guide you in a direction that may be different from what you'd planned. But for a good overall sense of what you're doing, pre-writing can be a great tool. And then you'll be ... beyond the elements of style!
Jeannette Cézanne
Customline Wordware, Inc.
