TRANSCRIPT: Pre-Writing Techniques: Planning & Idea Development

Speaker: Stewart Erlich

Pre-Writing Techniques: Strategies For Idea Development

Hi. My name is Stewart Erlich, and I’m a writing teacher. I’ve been a writing teacher for 12 years. And I what I’d like to do is give you an overview of the writing process, first, by just telling you a little bit about all the pieces of it and then by spending some time, really specifically, in the first stage of the writing process, which we’ll call “pre-writing.” So here we go.

The Writing Process

The pieces of the writing process that we’ll spend some time looking at are planning, generating ideas, organizing ideas and deciding on a focus, drafting a thesis statement, drafting the essay, and then revising in two different way, revising for content and revising for mechanics.

The Writing Process – Activity

So keeping in mind these pieces of the writing process, consider this question. When using the writing process, is it best to use all the steps all the time, use the steps in this order, or use the steps as a starting point and recognize the diversity of writing styles? Take a moment to answer this question.

A Fluid Process

Textbooks can often be a little bit misleading when it comes to this question. Sometime the way that the writing process is presented is it seems like it’s a linear process; you go from one stage to the next until you’re done with the essay. What I’m going to argue is really what writers do, what we all do when we write, is we visit each stage multiple times. We might not even start in the same place every time but that writing is a much more fluid and much more recursive process, where you really do end up doing a little bit of revising in the early stages, maybe a little bit of organizing in the later stages, so, really, the idea of the writing process is pretty fluid and we can use this as a starting point just so we can get a sense of what’s important.

So now that we’re talking about what’s important, let’s consider what stages of the writing process might be the most beneficial to spend time in.

What’s Important?

So what do you think might be the most important parts of the writing process? Where do you think you want to spend the most time? Would it be in those initial stages; in planning and generating ideas and organizing those ideas; would it be in the drafting stages; or would it be in the revising stages. Take a moment to answer the question for yourself.

The First 3 Stages

So what I’m going to argue, where you want to spend the most time is in the beginning stages, in the pre- writing, what I’m calling “pre-writing”, which is the first three stages of the writing process, when we look at planning, generating ideas, and organizing those ideas, because we have nothing to draft if we don’t have any ideas, and I think for most writers when you’re coming to a writing project and you’re staring at the computer for a long time and you don’t know what to write, it’s because you haven’t done the real work of writing, which is in pre-writing, getting your ideas together. So that’s what we’ll spend some time on today.

Today we’ll spend a lot of time focusing on those first three steps; planning, generating ideas, and organizing those ideas, and we’ll put those under the umbrella of pre-writing.

Stage 1

So the first thing we’ll look at is planning. Planning is a really important part of the writing process, even though it maybe doesn’t take that long, or at least it doesn’t take that long consciously. I think as soon as you get a writing assignment, whether you like it or not, you’re planning. You’re thinking about it while you’re driving home. You’ve thinking about it while you’re looking at the assignment sheet. You’re thinking about it in the shower, maybe not. But the point is that you will already be doing the work of writing once you see the assignment. And so the best way for us to do this is really to take an assignment and to look at it and put planning to work when we look at the assignment.

So what I’d like to do is give you an assignment that I see a lot in writing classes, especially through, you know, first-year college classes, and that is a typical assignment is a narrative essay. So the assignment might look something like, “Tell about an event, an important event that happened to you that had a lasting effect on your life.”

Planning Checklist

Planning

So the question is, you’ve been asked to write about an event that had a lasting effect on you, and now we can run that planning checklist through. So take a moment and consider the planning checklist and consider those questions, and write down your answers. We can look at the first one together. What is the task? The task is, I have to write about an event that happened to me that had a lasting affect on me.

Okay. We’re done. All right. So planning is not, you know, rocket science. It really is just externalizing some basic principles so that I’m clear about what I’m being asked to do. If I’m not clear about it, that’s really good information. That means I need to get some clarity. I need to ask some questions. So we did what is the task together. Now write down your answers to the other questions on the planning checklist.

Stage 2

Okay. So we’ve done our planning. Now we’re ready to figure out what we’re going to write. So the next stage in our writing process is generating ideas. And we have to think about where we’re going to get ideas. And with a narrative essay, sometimes our ideas just flow. We know our stories. But sometimes we get stuck. I definitely have had students who don’t necessarily know what they’re going to write about, can’t suddenly think of any stories that have happened to them in their entire life. So what do we do when we get stuck?

There are some ways to generate ideas. And as a way of thinking about generating ideas and all the different possibilities, I’d like to think a little bit about what the idea of multiple intelligences. When we talk about multiple intelligences, we’re talking about all the different ways that people process information, all the different ways that people learn. So there are intelligences that have to do with talking, linguistic intelligences. There are intelligences that have to do with listening. There are intelligences that have to do with acting or doing. Intelligences that have to do with seeing; right. So we can think about all those kinds of intelligences, and then maybe we can narrow them down, for our purposes, into three basic learning styles; visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Kinesthetic means movement.

So we can look at learning styles as a way that we can generate ideas by thinking about how can we access all the different ideas that we might have that we can’t necessarily think of off the top of our heads. What can we do visually, what can we do auditorily, and what can we do kinesthetically?

Applying Learning Styles

So thinking about learning styles, how can we think about some ways that we can generate ideas that really access visual, auditory, and kinesthetic modes?

I’m going to give you some possibilities, and we’ll play with them for a little while. One possibility is mind mapping, and, you know, mind mapping has been talked about in terms of clustering or webs and thinking like that, and it’s a very visual representation of ideas. We’ll also look at story boarding. Story boarding is something that videographers are familiar with, that web designers are familiar with, as a way to really get ideas down, again, in a visual way. We’ll also look at free writing, because we don’t need to take for granted that writing is a kinesthetic act; that we actually are, by writing, we create movement and we can access different parts of our brain if we need today be doing something. We can also look at some other possibilities there. Auditory methods might includes just talking. So we’ll look at ways that you can discuss and have those discussions recorded so that you can come back to the ideas you’ve discussed.

Mind Mapping

So let’s look at mind mapping specifically for a few minutes. Mind mapping is something that really works well for me. So when I was looking at this assignment, I chose to use a mind map to get my ideas together. That was the first thing I did. So, again, the assignment was to think about an idea or think about an event that had changed my life. So I started to collect stories, and I put a mind map together, just visually, that represented those stories. I had one bubble, sort of my central bubble that said, “An event that changed my life.” I wanted to make sure I was focused on what I was asked to do.

And then I started to separate out possibilities, stories from when I was a kid, things that I had happened to me when I was growing up, vacations I had taken with my friend, Brian, for instance, a time when my mom was in the hospital. And then I had stories from when I was a teenager. You know, I had a friend who went through some illness, and I thought maybe I could write about that. I was thinking about whether I should go to college or not. I thought maybe I could write about that. And then I had stories from when I was an adult. I decided to move to Colorado. I traveled in the Middle East for a while, and I also took a fishing trip that I remembered really vividly with a friend of mine from college. So I was just kind of -- I wasn’t making any decisions yet. I was just collecting raw material. And doing it in a visual way really works for me.

Storyboarding

Another possibility that’s also very visual is the idea of story boarding. And what story boarding really is is taking a story and making it visual, so taking each scene and making a visual representation of each scene. So there’s an example here from someone else, a different writer, who had decided that maybe one possibility for them would be to write about a time when this writer was taking her dogs for a walk and saw bears on the path. So she separated out into scenes. Scene one of her story board was you can see her running with her dogs. Scene two, you see that those big things on the path, those are bears. Scene three, the dogs actually chase the baby bear up a tree. And then scene four, you seen her grabbing her leashes and putting her dogs back on her leashes and collecting her dogs. That sort of happens in scene five a little bit too. And then scene six, everything is back to normal.

So you can see how this would really be a useful way to visually represent your ideas if you get stuck or you’re not sure how to organize. You go, “Oh, I want to talk about a trip that I took, but I don’t know what all the pieces are.” This might be a really good way to think about how much of that story you know and how much you might, you know, need to still think through.

Free Writing

Another method that’s really great to use is free writing, and this is, again, a kinesthetic way to collect ideas. And the idea with free writing is that you just want to write. There are no rule. The idea just is that you don’t stop writing, and no matter what you think, you write it down, even if what you’re thinking is, “I have no idea what to write.” So what I’ll take you through is a free write that I did, again, as I was thinking about this narrative essay assignment. Here is what I wrote. ”Let’s see. Okay. So I’m supposed to write about something that happened to me that changed me as a person, who I am as a result of all the stuff that has happened to me in my life. Some of it was big stuff like switching schools when I was in sixth grade. Some was little stuff, like when I went fishing with my uncle for the first time.

What else happened to me? I hung out with this kid, Brian, when I was young, and he got me into lots of trouble. He was a messed up kid. He used to pull the wings off of bees. One time he and I went on this really long bike ride, and no one knew where we were. My mom was pissed off when I finally came home. I used to hang out with this other kid, Allen. Got in trouble with him too. How about things that happened when I was older. My best friend in college was Pete. We used to go camping too, fishing. There was that one time that we caught that fish on the Delaware. That was pretty rough. Still a good trip, but I will never forget what happened with that fish. I used to go fishing all the time. What happened? Why not anymore? Maybe I will go sometime, but I really don’t want to. Maybe it was because of the thing with Pete.”

What you might be noticing in that free write is that I’m talking myself through a lot of ideas, and at the end, I actually talk myself into an idea, and I keep staying on it. So what happened for me as I was writing this free write was that I decided a little bit that, oh, I have something here that’s interesting, and I kept following it. So that’s kind of what we call -- as writing teachers, we call that “write to learn.” Sometimes we don’t know what we want to say until we’re writing, and then suddenly we have ideas.

Discussing & Recording

And so, finally, the last kind of generating ideas exercise that I would like to take you through is the idea of discussing and recording. The way that I’ve seen this work well is that it works really well when two people partner up. So, for instance, I just got the assignment, I’m thinking about the assignment, all these ideas are running through my head, it’s helpful for me to grab someone and say, “all right, here’s what I’m thinking. Here are my ideas.” And what I ask that person to do, when I’m talking, is write for me. All right. If I’m an auditory person, or even a linguistic person, someone who just needs to talk, that can be a really helpful idea so that I can get all -- sort of do a brain dump, get all my ideas out without having to worry about writing. So I talk for a few minutes, or for as long as I want to, and I have someone write for me.

Of course, if you’re alone, there’s lots of way you can do that too. You can record yourself and then go back and listen. So that can be a really good strategy if you’re more of an auditory or a verbal kind of learner.

Stage 3

So those are a few possibilities when it comes to generating ideas. Of course, there are so many more. But those might be some fun ones to play with.

What I want to say, before we move onto the next piece, which is about organizing ideas, is that I would really urge you in the pre-writing stage, where you’re just generating ideas, that you don’t decide yet what you’re writing about; that you just leave it really open ended and you think of as many possibilities as you can, because that will help you later in this next stage. And the next stage is organizing those ideas and deciding on your focus.

If I’ve done a really good job of collecting ideas and collecting stories during my idea generating stage, then I should have a lot of good things to look at, a lot of good things to play with, and that’s where I want to be at the time that I’m getting ready to organize ideas. I want to have an opportunity to look at all that stuff and decide what’s going to be, not only the most interesting for the reader, what’s going to be the most for me to write, what’s going to give me the most to say.

So what I did was I looked at my mind and I thought about all those ideas that I collected, and then finally decided, all right, I didn’t have a lot to say about, you know, my friend, Brian. You know, that was a story, but I didn’t want to tell it. I had other stories. You know, I didn’t want to talk about my friend in high school who had some illness. And then I just noticed that I had lots and lots of bubbles when it came to this one story about the fishing trip in Delaware. So I decided, okay, look at all that stuff I’ve got. That looks rich. That looks like I have a lot to say. So that’s when I make some decisions about what I want to focus on.

And, again, this doesn’t have to be a process that is in isolation. You can use other people. I think that’s really good idea, in fact. Show your mind map or show your free write to someone else, and say, “Look at all this stuff I’ve got. What is interesting? What would you like to read? Which piece of this do you think I should focus on,” and get some other ideas. Remember that writing is meant to be shared, you know, unless it’s a journal or something like that. So you want to know what other people would be interested in reading.

So what I wanted to say was that it’s really important to focus on organizing ideas as a separate stage from generating ideas. And now that you’ve done that, you can really decide on where you focus, and you can do that by yourself, just kind of looking at your material, or you can look at other people’s opinions about it. But it’s a really important thing, because we can’t always write about all of it. Sometimes it’s really important that we get focused, and now is a good place to do it, before we draft.

Choose 1 Technique

So now it’s your turn. Thinking about the different techniques we’ve look at for generating ideas, mind mapping, story boarding, free writing, and discussion, which one makes the most sense to you? Which one do you identify with the most? Decide which one you want to take through our narrative essay and how you’re going to generate ideas for that essay. Once you do that, once you have lots of ideas to play with, then you can look at how you’re going to organize those ideas and which ones you want to focus on. And you’re going to have an opportunity to really work through those things in a lot manufacture detail when you download the action plan and really go through that process.

Pre-Writing

So now we’ve looked at three stages of the writing process, the stages that I’m calling “pre-writing,” that include planning, generating ideas, and then organizing those ideas. Remember that this is probably, in my opinion, the most place you can spend a lot of time, because I don’t have anything to draft, I have no paper unless I have a lot of ideas first. So spending more time in pre-writing will pay dividends later, and you will discover that your paper writes itself if you’ve really don’t the work here.