Everybody thinks his daughter’s pretty special and has cornered the market on smarts and creativity, but it’s actually true of my daughter. Really. She reads like no kid her age outside the Guinness Book of World Records and has a memory I really envy. Her ability to use context to understand the essential meanings of big words she has no real business knowing is dazzling. From time to time, she’ll go on little writing jags. After getting a kitty for Christmas, she decided to write a little story from the cat’s perspective, homing in on things like how funny it is to the cat that these strange people prepare a box for her to potty in and so on.

My wife volunteers once a week in my daughter’s second-grade class, and yesterday she texted me a photo of a page she had found hidden in my daughter’s desk. The page was from a journal we had given her on whose cover she has written dire warnings to keep out and drawn protective chains. So of course my wife looked.

The page in question was one of apparently many many pages of pre-writing for a story-in-progress including things like character sketches, plot summaries, important notes about relationships among the characters, and explanations of things key to the underlying mythology of the story (e.g. “sirens are like evil mermaids”). As a seven-year-old, she’s doing things she’s never been taught to do that I’m often not disciplined enough to do with my own writing as an adult who’s been exposed to such exercises.

I could go on all day about my daughter and the likelihood of her rise to fame in the belles lettres, but this blog is supposedly about providing tips, tricks, inspiration, and discussion to help the readers get to writing. So I’ll put to you a question: What kind of pre-writing do you do, if any, and how important is it to your process as a writer?

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  1. Pre-writing. A concept I would love to be able to give justice. I sit with a piece of paper and start with a character and try to map our their past, their relationships – and then I get stuck on names. What is their Uncles name? Where is he from? The endless list of minute details that seems to pour out of this process – I get overwhelmed, and slowly, oh so slowly, the pen is placed on the desk (or the chair is pushed back from the keyboard) and I stop.

    I have found that the creative urge to write strikes me when I am travelling. Physically travelling – in a plane, on a road trip. For some reason the opening paragraph of ‘The’ book lays it’self out in my head – the soundtrack playing in my ears or on my stereo is setting the mood and I am desparately scrabbling for a pen and some paper to get it down. I recently discovered the voice record feature on my phone. So my last road trip I dictated the first chapter. The next rainy day perhaps I will type it out and see where it flows.

    Good luck to your daughter – to be so in touch with words and imagery at her age – it’s a rare gift.

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  2. It depends on what I’m writing. If it is a poem, usually it comes from the soul and has no pre-writing. With lyrics, it depends on where I’m going with the song…so sometimes there is and sometimes there isn’t. But when I have a project that I decide on whether a book, how-to, or a short story…lots of pre-writing, outlines, characterizations, setting ideas are involved then. I have one children’s book that I have worked on over the years that has a family tree of 6 generations that I did for it, with notes on each family member along with it. I know the characters in the stories in that book so well, they are like my own family.

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  3. Even though my ‘writing’ typically involves one or two lines in my cartoon captions, I often use mind maps to explore different caption ideas. I play with words. My thesaurus is my best friend to find that quirky, funny sounding word to help with the humour.
    Marti.
    PS. At least you can take credit for half the genes that make up your talented daughter. 🙂

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  6. Depends on what I’m doing, but generally I take an idea and just start writing. Then, when I start to feel slightly overwhelmed, I stop writing on the story and start working out things like characters, and ideas for the world and so on. It depends on how complex it gets. Most of the things are worked out in my mind though. I do have one story where I have tons of notes, but not much actual story, that happens too. What I usually write down though is a timeline, to put events in order and all that, because I seem to lose track of that easily.

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  7. Pre-writing, enhance skills, towards the actual-writing stage e.g. sketches, fold-ups etc. Incorporating this, shouldn’t be left-out, for writers, as well as, startups, as it gears-up, revives, enlightens etc, for putting-in, all possible, effort. I hereby, appreciate your contribution. Thanks.

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  8. Since I write about places to walk, I take notes as I walk. The details are impossible to remember. Often it’s a phrase, that catches my imagination at the time – as “a bus of geese” – seeing a flock fly across the horizon in the distance. Then I draft and then I post.

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  9. I’d be surprised if she didn’t turn out to be a writer some day! As for me, I don’t do any exercises, unless mindless drivel writing counts. Eventually it becomes something…

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  10. Nice and lovely daughter that you have. keep writing at a young age and when she grows up, she can eventually run a publishing company. Keep investing in your child.

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  11. I love pre-writing! To me, pre-writing is more fun and exciting because I get to create the characters, the world, flesh out all the little details and see the entire story unfold in my head before putting pen to paper. Or rather- fingers to keyboard.. I love every little thing about the pre-writing/brainstorming process! Another reason I love pre-writing so much is that I have little faith in my writing ability. So I usually just do a hell of a lot of pre-writing and then let it all just sit until I’m brave enough to have a go at writing it. Haha.. 😛

    I think I was a lot like your daughter is with pre-writing when I was younger. Probably more so starting around 9 years old, but unfortunately, I never really got the chance to do much creative writing in school, so many of those entries in my own ‘journal’ never saw the light of day. I hope your daughter’s creativity and whatnot are nurtured! She obviously has a real gift and intelligence for her age. 🙂

    Amber. xx

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    1. I have to get courage before I can write, sometimes too. I also occasionally lose my drive for writing down what I’m thinking about if I pre-write too much.

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  12. If I am posting on my blog I usually sit down without any Idea at all except that I will write. No idea at all, well not quite, I am a mystic and I blog about it. I sit and wonder if some idea will come, Word by word I write and a sentence is revealed, eventually a topic and I begin to have a sense of what I am writing about.

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  13. ‘Pre-writing’ that is a new word for me. Unlike your daughter who does this in a systematic way, I guess most of us weekend writers have our own chaotic ways of doing it. On my blog, write about incidents from my past, and try to present them in the form of stories. The way I do this is, first of all I set myself a target of one post every two weeks. Next, from my collection of memories pick out ones which stand out. Then sit down and force myself to write down a story with those memories in about 800 -1000 words.
    The first draft is always pathetic.Have to force myself to get it done with. Once done,save the effort and ignore it for the next couple of hours. The second time I read it, I edit about 60% of the text, simply delete the words and put in new lines and sentences. The overall effect I try for is to see that there is a flow in the narrative, also the attempt is to keep it crisp and to the point.
    Now I ask my wife to proof read the story. Last edits are made and the story is ready for being published.

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  14. Pre-writing for me is thinking about what I want to write, writing down small snippets of great ideas, dialogues, lines, and even paragraphs that come to me. I usually have to let ideas stew around for awhile in my head before it becomes clear what I actually want to say and how I want to say it.
    Then I write a first draft all at once.

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  15. Just finished a creative writing residency with 90 elementary school students. We had four days to create an outline, define story line including conflict, resolution and climax. Students learned characterization, story development (who, what, when, where, how and why), writing, the art of re-write and performing the story in readers theatre style.

    It was a fast and furious week with a fantastic imaginative pay-off. It is encouraging, that despite the cut backs in schools, as writers we can find creative spirits amongst us to carry the written word.

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      1. I wouldn’t dream of it! I guess I look forward to your grammatical thoughtful posts and I was a bit surprised to find it was proud dad time. You might get the empathy from the parents, but a few others will be switched off. I’m sure one of the top tips for blogging is about consistency? A little variation is good – but it needs to be chosen with care. Anyway, I managed to provide ‘critical feedback’ (!) to at least two other blogs yesterday, so you weren’t alone in receiving my helpful opinion. I have suggested on justanotherwordpressblog that you may wish to consider revamping the DP. And there is considerable overlap between the two blogs. Just saying.

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  17. Thank you for your well written message. I am just getting ready to write my first blog, and yours was an inspiration . . . interesting, a little funny, and tugged at my heart strings (4 children and 1 grandchild) I only hope I can be half as interesting!

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  18. I’m really new in all of these things about writing post in WordPress. My english is’nt very good at all, but I have a lot of ideas, my problem is that sometimes I don’t know how to put them “in paper”. The story of this little girl made me to remember my own past as a kid, when I used to write and draw without any type of problems.
    I have to find that kid again. She hided somewhere inside me.

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  19. Frankly, this story about the seven-year-old genius sounds a bit fanciful and exaggerated. Did she really come up with this pre-writing strategy without any prompting from mom and dad?

    Personally, I never intentionally do any sort of pre-writing, although it took me almost 40 years to write a screenplay (still unproduced). So the early stages could be called pre-writing. The idea came to me with the story almost fully formed and I hacked out a first, very fundamental version in which, to my dismay, I was unable to make the characters speak – very frustrating. In fact, this first attempt was a treatment without my knowing it: I had heard the word in connection with screenwriting, but didn’t know exactly what it meant. Anyway, having no idea how to go about developing the thing, I put it away and some years later got the idea of writing it as a novel in the manner of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, each chapter being a narration by one of the characters, going back and forth among them. It got off the ground, but really it didn’t fly, and I left it off about halfway through. Then a couple of years ago a filmmaker friend suggested that the two of us write a screenplay together on an idea of his. I agreed, but when the initial material I produced didn’t get a follow-up from him I decided to relaunch the ancient scenario. After writing an outline on file cards, according to my friend’s suggestion – very useful – I whipped the whole thing out in about a month, then later made various small revisions, though so far it has retained its structure and actually, almost everything written in that short period, about two months altogether.

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