Tips to Improve Your Writing Process!

A good screenplay has thousands of moving parts and a writer has to get them all right. That’s a herculean task. But there are ways to make it easier, even workable.

The Problem

Are you one of those writers who creates purely from emotion or inspiration and finds yourself getting stuck in act two?

Are you one of those creatives who just starts writing and does finish a draft but then you suffer massive rewrites because you didn’t develop your story properly and so typed in a second-rate narrative?

Are you one of those creatives who has many good story ideas but just can’t get one finished as a completed story?

Are you one of those creatives who waits for inspiration but finds that this only leads to anxiety and procrastination?

The Solution

A key solution to these common and costly creative problems is to learn and apply a clearly worked out writing process. To create a lengthy and good story without a writing process is almost impossible.

What is a writing process?

It’s a method, a system, an organized, logical process for you to follow to write a story. A good writing process guides and prompts you during the three main stages of writing: Developing/Outlining, Drafting, and Editing.

Writing a story is complex and difficult and demands knowing many skills, techniques and tricks that have to be mastered so a wannabe fiction scribe can become a productive, skilled and professional storyteller. Having a writing process is like having a mentor hold your hand, trigger your thoughts, and guide you along a sure path so you can get your story developed, written, and done.

Story coaches teach a writing process. For example, in my Mentorship Program I teach my clients a logical method of many tricks and techniques (big and small) of how to create a screenplay while they are actually writing one through all its stages. Following are just a few techniques from the writing process I teach my clients to indicate how a full writing process could help you:

Research

My favourite part of fiction writing is what I call the Research/Fantasy phase of writing (which is part of the Developing/Outlining stage). I love reading books about the subject of my story -- I tend to write historical adventure stories with a theme. This research is fundamental to the quality of my characters and events. Over the years, I’ve found that often the best research is to read personal memoirs, histories or journals of people who actually lived in the period or location that my story takes place. Some years back, for example, I wrote an adventure/drama script set in colonial Australia and had to learn a lot about traditional Aboriginal tribal life. One of my saviours was Google Books, where (for free) I found first-hand accounts by explorers and anthropologists of their interactions with the wild tribes. History truly is stranger than fiction. These firsthand history accounts were gold for my story! They made it so much better.

Outlining & Drafting

I highly recommend that you outline your story (again this is from the first stage of writing). That is, that you have the whole plot worked out and written down in a brief headline type of form.

Having an outline not only forces a writer to work out the whole story, especially the climax!, but it is also an invaluable guide and prompt when drafting your script. For example, when drafting all writers need mental prompts or triggers to bring up material from their subconscious. This is vital when drafting. But a creative needs an organized, logical and controllable way to do this prompting to bring up the relevant story material. A writer doesn’t want a free-floating explosion from their subconscious of anything that just pops up. A writer only wants material logically and dramatically related to their story to come out. The best way to achieve this is to use an outline as a guide when drafting. An outline tells your mind what to bring up for the draft (, and thus implicitly what not to bring up.) I teach my Mentorship clients how to write an outline and how to use it during drafting.

Editing

I was taught many years ago the principle of editing in layers. My general application of this principle is to edit from big issues to smaller ones, but this principle is really contextual. For example, after completing a first draft and doing a spell check, the first edit of my story that I perform is to fix the obvious mistakes and omissions I made during the drafting process. After that I tackle the big story problems that are easily evident as I read through the script. Then I would keep editing away on continuing lesser and lesser issues until finally all the problems I can see are fixed. Then it’s time to pay an objective pro to have a look to find all the things I missed. (And yes they’re always there! Uggh.) I strongly advise you to work out as part of your writing method an editing process, a hierarchy and context of what to edit and how, and when to do it.

Why

A writing process is not a luxury or for most creatives an option. It’s a basic necessity to writing a good story. A writing process will also guide and support you during all the self-doubt, angst, failure, and struggle of developing, writing and finishing a story. If you don’t have a (good) writing process, you will trip over or get lost in those thousands of moving parts of a story! I can’t stress enough how a writing process is your best friend as a writer. It is your guide and comforter to help you know what to do and when and how to do it.

If you are tired of your hit and miss approach to writing and all the fear and failure that this engenders, learn a logical and productive process of how to create a story.

This is your big choice: Are you a hobbyist writer or are you serious about becoming a professional writer of good stories? If you are the latter, start today to develop and practice a writing process to help you create and finish your stories. Or hire a professional to teach you a logical, practical, and productive writing process. Pros have a writing process!

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