How to write in 5 steps

Get better at writing and you get better at thinking

Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

I started writing when I was 17 years old.

It was the summer of 1999, and I was going to work as an Ontario Junior Ranger for the summer. The train ride north to Cochrane was 10-plus hours.

With nothing else to do, I cracked an empty diary and started.

I have been writing ever since, composing lesson plans, typing up reading passages, sending out hundreds of reference letters, dashing off thousands of emails.

It’s been 25 years.

Here are 5 steps I follow when I work on a piece of writing:

1. How do I find something to write about?

I can’t force myself to write about something I’m not interested in.

That’s why this Substack is called Thoughts All Sizes. That’s why I jump around from tattoos to Taylor Swift to near abductions in Japan to lessons from fantasy sports.

When you’re trying to find something to write about, ask yourself two questions:

1. What’s a memory I can’t stop replaying in my mind?

2. What’s an idea I can’t stop thinking about?

I don’t know why I obsess over certain memories, and God only knows where ideas come from, but these are things I can write about.

If you can’t get it out of your head, you should write about it.

At the very least, writing will help you digest the memory or process the idea.

2. How do I write a first draft?

Once I have a topic, I write everything I think about it.

That first draft is awkward and clumsy.

I’ll stop writing to go do research.

The vocabulary is redundant.

The sentences don’t flow.

I go off on tangents.

That’s okay.

At this stage, I’m writing to chase down every loose thought I have on the topic.

Then, it no longer lives in my head as a totally tangled and disheveled mess.

Once it’s all down on paper in front of me, it’s real and manageable.

3. How do I revise and edit my first draft?

When you revise, you are reworking the overall organization and flow of ideas. Your ideas need to be put in an order that makes sense to the reader.

The biographer Walter Isaacson said in an interview that chronological order works best. It’s not stylish, but it’s natural and easy for readers to follow.

Chronological order is how we tell oral stories to each other. Start, middle, end.

There are two disheartening features to revision:

1. you will throw out a lot of what you wrote in your first draft

2. it will take a long time to get the piece of writing you originally envisioned

With every piece of writing, I always get to the point where I think, “You’re in over your head here. This isn’t making sense anymore.”

When I get to this point, I take a deep breath.

Then I think of the one small action I can take to keep this piece moving along.

Then I take that action. Then I think of the next small action. Then I take that.

Then I just keep stacking small actions to get through the revision process.

If revision is big picture, editing is granular.

Editing is sentence structure, word choice, grammar, punctuation, spelling.

The finicky bits.

I always edit for clarity.

That’s what teaching English as a second language students for 15 years did to me.

I was forever trying to explain some complex concept in the fewest and simplest words I could think of.

4. What do I do after revising and editing?

This step is a complete luxury. You might not have time for it.

Put your piece of writing in a drawer and walk away from it for at least 24 hours.

Let your mind work on it subconsciously. Good things happen in your sleep.

God only knows how, but my thoughts arrange themselves in better ways at night.

New words pop into my consciousness.

In the morning I have “fresh eyes.”

I’m a slightly different person than I was when I first wrote the piece.

That’s an interesting place from which to do your last revisions and edits.

5. How do I put on the finishing touches?

The closer you get to the end, the more you should cut.

You’ll be tempted to add.

Don’t give in.

Do you remember finger painting in kindergarten?

You’d put some blue on the paper. Then some red. A little yellow.

Then you would get excited and put every color you had on the paper and swirl it all around and end up with a gross brown mess.

That’s what the director Darren Aronofsky calls “making it brown.” It’s when a creator keeps adding, when you should be stripping away.

The challenge with finishing a piece of writing is don’t make it brown.

Don’t tinker forever. Set a deadline and put it out into the world.

Once I’ve published a piece of writing, the memory or idea is gone from my head.

I don’t have to think about it anymore. I have nothing else to say on the topic.

It’s a relief.

I can listen more attentively to my family. I’m open to other memories and new ideas. I’m not caught up, tripping over the same old, same old.

If you develop a writing habit, it carries over to your regular, everyday thinking. You can think about new topics in a clearer, more logical way.

There’s less stuff in your head that gets in the way of thinking.

You can conjure up the opposing viewpoints to your own ideas.

Writing is work, and it’s hard, but get better at writing and you get better at thinking.