Want to finish the first draft sooner? Here are my 5 favourite prewriting strategies from bower birding to brainstorming.
When you’re staring down the barrel of a looming deadline, the last thing you want to hear is that there’s one more step you need to take before you start writing.
But there is. And it’s called: prewriting.
Prewriting helps you shape raw experiences into meaningful narrative before you type a single word.
Because good writing doesn’t start with typing – it starts with thinking.
That’s where prewriting comes in.
The big, outsized benefits of prewriting
Prewriting can help you generate fresh ideas, make novel connections, identify gaps in your knowledge, and untangle the spaghetti twirl of thoughts inside your head.
It can suggest new ways to approach a subject, identify key themes, sidestep irrelevant distractions, and help you figure out what the story is really about.
So, while yet another step might sound time-consuming, I’ve personally found that it makes the writing process itself faster, easier, and a lot less painful.
(Here are some more tips on how to speed up your writing output.)
Prewriting takes many different forms.
You’re probably already using it already – without even realising.
If that’s the case, what follows might help you make prewriting a more conscious practice.
It will help you dig deeper into a variety of strategies, how they work, and why, and the best way to tackle different tasks.
It may also provide a few new tools for you to polish up and work with.
What is prewriting?
Prewriting is anything you do before you sit down to write the first draft.
It doesn’t necessarily include outlining or journalling (although it can).
Outlining involves knocking a piece of writing into shape and ensuring clarify, flow and coherence, by organising your main and supporting ideas in a logical structure.
Journalling involves the regular practice of writing down thoughts, feelings, and experiences to reflect, process emotions, and gain personal insight.
Both are valuable to any writer, but I’m not including them in this article.
(Separate posts on outlining and journalling are in the works.)
The strategies below are more free-ranging, fluid and far less goal-directed in nature.
They’re designed to boost your productivity and creativity – as well as the satisfaction you feel from completing any writing project.
They’re arranged here, in order, from my most to least favourite.
The beauty of bower birding
Become a collector of brochures, feathers, museum tickets, stones, seashells, badges, leaves, boarding passes, magnets, coasters, matchboxes, postcards, receipts, and assorted other souvenirs and use them as a springboard for stream of consciousness writing. Ask yourself, ‘What did this object witness that I didn’t?’ Or, ‘What five sensations does it evoke?’ Or, ‘What feeling does handling this object evoke?’
In his book Souvenir, Rolf Potts explores the meaning and memory imbued in travel keepsakes. He interviews travellers and shares personal stories of how simple objects like a bottle cap or a faded map have triggered long-form reflections on culture, nostalgia, and place.
Boost fluency with freewriting
You can use a prompt exactly like the one above or just start with something like, ‘What am I trying to say?’ Freewriting involves scribbling like a maniac – writing continuously without stopping or editing, and focussing on generating thoughts and ideas without bothering with impediments like grammar, spelling, structure or even legibility.
Freewriting can promote divergent thinking through boosting fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. (For more on the benefits of developing a divergent thinking style, read this.) Natalie Goldberg’s book Writing Down the Bones advocates freewriting to bypass your internal editor and tap into raw creative energy. She urges writers to write quickly without stopping to self-censor.
Carving out a spare five minutes before you officially start work each day may even form the foundation of a valuable writing ritual.
Brainstorming for beginners
Like others who’ve suffered through group brainstorming sessions in a corporate setting, I have a fraught relationship with this technique. Fortunately, the research is clear. Due to social loafing effects, group brainstorming yields fewer good ideas than individuals can generate on their own. (And, for the record, there is such a thing as a stupid idea, and it usually comes from the loudest person in the room.)
You will, unavoidably, come up with plenty of stupid ideas when you brainstorm on your own – and that’s OK. Once you’ve cleared out the stupid, unoriginal, boring ideas, you’ll reach the gems lying buried underneath them. To brainstorm to best effect, set a timer for 10-15 minutes, jotting down every little scrap of thought that comes to mind related to your topic.
The goal is quantity, not quality. Later, you can review the results of your brainstorm to identify promising leads, patterns, or ideas. Or you can toss the lot and start again. Stephen King emphasises capturing every idea without judgment in his book On Writing.
Social seeding can kickstart structure
When I’m on the road, posting a few photos to Instagram with an extended caption can help me bottle the experience before memory fades – and be a little bit playful with it. What I like to call ‘social seeding’ also forces me to do a chunk of the nitty-gritty research before sitting down to write the higher stakes, more serious story that an editor has commissioned. Often, when I’m struggling with the latter, I can return to the colour and detail of the Instagram feed to refresh my enthusiasm for the topic or destination.
Social seeding can work in other ways too. Summarising key points in a concise and engaging format can help clarify your main arguments and identify what an audience will find most compelling. Jedidiah Jenkins posted daily Instagram captions during his bike trip from Oregon to Patagonia. The practice helped him refine storytelling rhythm and recall vivid details that later shaped his book To Shake the Sleeping Self.
Reverse mind mapping for contrarians
Mind mapping involves visually organising your ideas around a central concept. As the name suggests, reverse mind mapping does the opposite. In reverse mind mapping, you kick off with scattered, seemingly unrelated thoughts or images, then try to find connections between them. Essentially, you’re building the map backwards, in a more tentative, exploratory manner, rather than staking your claim on a single ‘big’ idea that you’ve decided is the starting point.
Filmmaker David Lynch, uses a process that he describes as Catching the Big Fish. He starts with disconnected dream fragments or images and drawing meaning from them. A similarly playful method is used by writer Lynda Barry, who wrote several guides including What It Is. She reportedly asks students to list random things that scared, excited, or embarrassed them, then draw lines between ideas that chat to one another.
Mind mapping starts with the premise that you already know what the story is about. Reverse mind mapping uses associative networks in the brain to uncover the hidden links that say so much more.
Over to you …
Which prewriting techniques are you already using? And did you find a couple of new ones?
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