How to Start Your Writing Project

Prewriting activities can push you off the starting blocks and help you escape from mid-project detours and dead ends.

I love to swim, but swimming is an activity with high barriers to entry. There is the logistical barrier of driving to a pool. There is the sartorial barrier of swimwear. But those barriers pale in comparison to that presented by the moment when I am sitting on the edge of the pool, feet in the water, thinking about jumping in. I adjust my swim cap. I tighten my goggles. I glance at the sweeping second hand on the time clock. I’ll do any amount of fiddling to avoid the initial shock of that cold water.

Starting to Write Is Hard

Writing is like that. In fact, before starting this post, I checked my email (all three accounts), looked up the driving distance to a family reunion in two weeks, and spent some time poking around on the LMS of a university where I teach, looking for resources on prewriting. I was brought to my senses by one of the resources, which described how former vice-president John C. Calhoun avoided writing projects by plowing his fields (Wyrick, 2014). Point made.

If this is how I behave when faced with a short blog post, it’s no wonder that starting a project like a dissertation chapter or a research paper for a seminar causes many graduate students to suddenly develop an irresistible urge to dust the baseboards or catch up on all those missed newsletters from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Prewriting Can Help You Get Started

Thinking of writing as a process can help. And prewriting is the first step. Instead of staring at the proverbial blank page, assign yourself some prewriting tasks. What is prewriting? It’s all the activities you do before you start to write the first draft of your project. This, of course, includes research, but I’ll save that topic for another post (or series). Today, we’ll focus more narrowly on activities closer to the actual writing.

Prewriting helps you get started because it helps you understand more about what you want to say. The same author whose vice-presidential story kicked me into writing mode also said this: “Before you write a single sentence, you should always remind yourself that (1) You have valuable ideas to tell your reader, and (2) more than anything, you want to communicate those ideas to your reader” (Wyrick, 2014, p. 4). Prewriting helps you do that, and it also helps you consider how best to communicate those ideas.

Activities for Prewriting

Prewriting includes activities such as:

Brainstorming: Writing down as many ideas as you can in a set amount of time, focusing on quantity, not quality.

Freewriting: Writing whatever comes to mind for a set amount of time (often 15 minutes, but it can be any length of time). You can do true freewriting, which means you write anything that comes to mind, even if it is “I don’t know what to write.” You can also do more directed freewriting, in which you respond to a particular prompt.

Peter Elbow (1973) noted that the real value of freewriting is that it “undoes the ingrained habit of editing at the same time you are trying to produce” (p. 6) There is absolutely a time for making sure you are communicating your best ideas as clearly and elegantly as possible, but that time comes much later in the writing process. Activities like brainstorming and freewriting kickstart your brain, freeing you from the pressure of producing one right answer and thereby opening the door to many answers, one or more of which may be workable. These kinds of activities can help you when you are considering topics or research questions, or when you are trying to come up with ideas related to your topic, perhaps for a literature review. They might also work when considering limitations, areas for future research, or implications of your study.

Other prewriting activities are more structured.

Mind mapping: Creating a visual representation of your topic and related ideas. Use an app such as Lucidchart or good old paper and pencil to help you see connections between ideas (or to make sure everything relates to your research question).

Synthesis “freewriting”: This structured form of freewriting would work well after you have done most of your research for your literature review. Write an essay of several pages, in which you explore what you have learned, themes that appear in your reading, and how you are thinking and feeling about your topic. This can help you get started with the organization of your literature review. It can also show you where gaps exist. Those gaps could mean you need to head back to the library database, but they could also be a place to situate your own research.

Outlining: Another prewriting activity is outlining. Many great outline methods exist, from the trusty Roman numeral and letter system to index cards, sticky notes, and online tools. You can use a mind map as an outline, too. Outlining is such a vital skill that I will dedicate the next post to it.

In a large project such as a thesis, capstone, or dissertation, you will likely do prewriting activities several times, rather than only at the very beginning. Whenever you are stuck for ideas or unsure about connections or missing pieces, or lost in some winding dead-end argument, consider using one of the prewriting activities in this post to help get unstuck.

Next time: Outlining – How organization leads to smoother drafting and a more comprehensible product.

References

Elbow, P. (1973). Writing Without Teachers. Oxford University Press. Access this book for free on Internet Archive.

Wyrick, J. (2014). Steps to Writing Well. Cengage. Access this book for free on Internet Archive.

More Information

The Well-Ordered Mind exists to support graduate school persistence. Success coaching can bring structure, peace, and progress to your grad school journey. Click the button below to set up a free consultation and find out more.