Daily writing is a key component of the morning routine I’m developing. A great morning writing session can make for a great day, because it brings out the best in me. It activates my concentration and curiosity, engages my intellect and intentionality, and helps me enter a state of flow.
While I’ve developed a routine for starting to write at a certain point every morning, I have not had a set routine for the writing process itself. I would like to develop such a routine, because the smoother and more rhythmic I make the writing process, the more quickly and reliably it can work its magic.
Yesterday, I sketched out an outline of such a writing process. Today I’ll try to formulate it in this post. I’m also testing out the writing process by using it for this post explaining it. Pretty “meta,” I know!
Every morning, I will work on two essays, finishing one and starting another. In the first part of my writing session, I will write and publish an essay I planned the day before. Then, I will plan the essay I will write and publish the day after.
I’m breaking it up this way for the following two reasons:
I consider “pre-writing” (planning the essay) to be crucial, because it makes the writing process much smoother and the written product much more coherent. (I elaborate on this in my post "Writers, Do This Before You Outline.”)
As important as pre-writing is, it is the writing itself and finishing an essay that most powerfully gets me into a flow state. So I want to dive straight into word-smithing and prose-crafting first thing in the morning.
By planning each essay the day before, I lay groundwork that sets me up to hit the ground running the next morning.
Here’s the process I have in mind.
Pick a Topic
The first stage in the life cycle of a daily essay, and the first step in pre-writing, is to pick a topic. I create a new document for the essay and in that document journal about what I could write about. I ask myself questions like:
How can I build on what I’ve been writing recently?
What ideas, insights, and observations have been developing in my mind recently?
What experiences have I had that have been instructive or otherwise interesting?
Once I come upon a subject I really like, I give my document a fitting working title.
Gather Material
Then I start gathering material relevant to that topic. I brainstorm a list of specific things I could say about that subject: facts I could relate, points I could make, ideas and processes I could explain, stories I could tell, etc. Often such brainstorming will remind me of relevant source material from the web and from books I’ve read. So I will then find relevant passages and links and gather those into my document as well.
Decide Structure
Once I have enough raw material to work with, I figure out how I want to structure my post. Do I share a problem I’ve encountered and explain how I’m trying to solve it? Do I (as in this piece) walk the reader through a process step-by-step? Do I tell the reader a story, episode-by-episode? Or do I present the reader with an argument, point-by-point?
Create Outline
Once I have a basic structure in mind, I’m ready to draft an outline. To outline the beginning, I think about how best to open the piece and set up the reader to understand what I’m going to present and why. Then I think about what would follow naturally after that and add items to my outline accordingly. Then I think about what would follow naturally after that and add still more items. I repeat that process until I have the entire piece outlined. As I go, I refer to the raw material I gathered in step 2, integrating each item into my outline wherever it fits best. Once I have a good outline, I have the direction and framework I will need the next morning to start writing right out of the gate.
Write Rough Draft
As soon as I’m at my desk in the morning, I open up my essay document. I reread the first item in my outline and write the first sentence. I don’t worry yet whether the sentence is good enough to publish. I just spit out prose that expresses the gist of what I’m trying to say at whatever level of eloquence my still-waking brain is able to muster in the moment. Then I move on to the next sentence. I keep going in this manner, continually referring back to my outline to guide my writing, until I have a full rough draft of the piece.
Package the Piece
After I’ve finished writing out the rough draft, I have a fleshed-out idea of what I’m going to say, so I’m ready to fittingly “package” the piece: to write a title and subtitle and to choose a featured image.
The act of packaging the piece gives me a more refined understanding of what I’m trying to express. So then I’m primed to write the final draft.
Write Final Draft
I start my final draft by inserting a new line above the first paragraph of the rough draft and rewriting that paragraph there, along with any new follow-up paragraphs I come up with. I delete the rough-draft version of the paragraph once I’ve incorporated everything in it that’s worth keeping into my final draft. Then I repeat that process for the next paragraph. In this way, my final draft grows by gradually “eating” my rough draft.
I prefer this rewriting approach over simply editing my rough draft copy, because I don’t want to be wedded to any of the rough draft’s clumsy phrasing.
Writing the final draft is when I start having fun with wording, the turns of phrase begin to tumble out, I become emotionally invested in polishing the piece, and I enter into a flow state.
Format, Publish, and Publicize
Once my writing is finished, I transfer everything—the essay’s title, subtitle, featured image, and body—to a new post in Substack’s CMS.
Then I do one more read-through, adapting the formatting for Substack as necessary, fixing any typos, and making minor edits.
Finally, I click publish, which posts the essay on Substack and sends it out as an email to my subscribers. I also share it on Facebook.
Repeat
Then I start the above process all over again by journaling about what to write tomorrow. Since I’ve written my way into a creative flow state, developing ideas for my next essay should be fairly easy.
I roughly followed the above process for this post, and it worked quite well. I’ll keep testing it on subsequent posts and report back.