Now that you know how to come up with great story ideas, you need to know how to take those ideas, and turn them into stories.
You could, of course, just take the idea and start writing. That’s what most inexperienced writers do. But if you start telling your story that way, without knowing where you’re going with it, or even how you’re going to develop it, you’ll likely run into some problems.
You don’t want to do that. You’re sitting on an awesome idea with so much potential. You need a plan in order to conquer it—a blueprint that to follow that you know will produce high quality stories time after time. You need to have a solid writing process.
Everybody has their own unique writing style; so it follows that everyone has their own unique writing process as well. And it’s important for you to figure out your writing process as soon as possible: because finding it is just as important to telling a story as coming up with the story idea. Without an idea you have nothing to write about; without a process you have no way to act on your idea.
Now, since your process is unique to you, I can’t just give you one. It’s up to you to discover it for yourself. What I can do, however, is show you what my writing process looks like—and hopefully that will help you find your own.
1. Discovery
Step one of my writing process is to uncover the material that I’ll use to write my story. I do this by freewriteing the story from beginning to end. This allows me to get the entire story, as it is in my imagination, out of my head in it’s rawest form. Often times there are even extra pieces that work their way in that I didn’t know were part of the story before I started writing
This is technically my first draft, and it’s normally completely embarrassing.But that’s good, because after I finish this draft I can clearly see the story and what I need to do in the next step to correct the major issues.
2. Structuring
Step two is to take all of the raw materials that I gathered in step one, and to form them into something that looks roughly like the story I intended to write. This is when I decide which pieces of the story to keep and which to throw out. I don’t need to use everything I write in step one to tell my story. And remember, I’m writing a short story: the shorter I can make it, the better.
Structuring, to me, is like piecing together a skeleton for the story. It’s a barebones telling of what’s in my head.
3. Drafting
Step three is fairly simple: I’ve already done the majority of the work in steps one and two. Step three is all about putting flesh on the bones. This is when I pretty up my writing, add more descriptive language, and make sure that the story is not only visually appealing, but also enjoyable to read.
This is when I go through the story, line by line, working from a writer’s point of view, focusing on telling the story at a sentence level.
4. Aging
It’s healthy to have a specific time set aside in your writing process to let the story sit. That’s what step four of my writing process is for me. I let whatever I’m writing sit for a time and I try to forget about it.
The goal of step four is to make it so that, when I eventually return to writing the story, I can look at it with new eyes. Hopefully, if I did this step properly, when I come back to it I will be able to clearly see what minor adjustments need to be made in the last step.
5. Redrafting
The last step in my process is to write the story over, from beginning to end. I write, again from a writer’s point of view, focusing on each and every word that I write. This is my final draft. I want to make sure that it is the best possible story that I can produce at the time.
This step may sound redundant to you, but it’s completely necessary to my writing process. Without it, without the tiny little adjustments that are always made during a redrafting, my stories never feel quite right to me.