Pre-writing is the process of getting ideas down on paper before you’re ready to write for audience. It is intended for your eyes only, so it can be messy to the point of illegibility, haphazard to the point of unintelligibility, ungrammatical to the point of incomprehensibility. You’ll know what you mean. And eventually, when you get around to drafting, you’ll be able to translate your chicken scratching into sentences and paragraphs that will convey cool ideas to an audience. But at this point, forget about who might eventually read your writing. This is for you alone.
You might use any several of these strategies on a given piece of writing; you’ll never use all of them for one piece of writing. Some you’ll use all the time; some very occasionally. Start anywhere, proceed to whatever method might help you next. You’re simply trying to generate ideas.
FREE-WRITING is the first of your basic tools. Look at your topic, then take five or ten minutes and force your pen to move on the paper, without pausing, without thinking. If you go off topic, that’s fine. If you have to write “I don’t know what to write” fifteen times before your mind gets bored of that and takes you in a new direction, that’s okay too. Just write.
LOOPING is the second essential tool. Look at any piece of pre-writing, circle the most interesting idea on that page, and make yourself free-write about that idea. See where it leads you. Then maybe loop again, about some new interesting idea that came up.
TALKING is much ignored as a pre-writing tactic. Having a good conversation places the same demands on you that good writing does: you must be interesting, personal, clever and/or wise, engaged with the ideas you’re discussing. Start a conversation with someone on the topic you’ve been assigned, see where it leads. Then jot notes, and loop!
READING can help spark ideas. Have other writers attempted a similar project? Do their approaches suggest tactics or topics you might explore? Or is there information about your topic that might launch you more deeply into your thoughts? Do you know enough about your topic to write intelligently and interestingly about it? After (or while) you read anything useful, free-write, loop, and/or talk about it: get into a dialogue with the ideas, form and style of other writers, to inspire yourself.
NOTE-TAKING is essential if research and specifics will help you to prove a point. You might create formal notecards, you might highlight or sticky-note passages, you might do dialectical journaling, but whatever form your notes take, include your own response to the information you take down. How does this information inform or change your thoughts about the topic? For more advice on this kind of pre-writing, see our research guide.
MAPPING is a more spatial pre-writing form: write a word in the center of a page, then brainstorm associated words for 5-10 minutes, as quickly as you can, filling up the page with words, in no pattern. Once you’re done, look for the patterns. Circle two words that seem related, and draw a line between them. Keep doing that until your page is a web of connections. Then free-write and loop about connections you made, patterns you see.
DRAWING works for many people, both because they find it a meditative space to consider a topic, and because it can open subliminal ways of thinking about the topic. The key is to use the drawing: free-write and loop about what you see in it.
OUTLINING can be very useful once you’ve done a lot of pre-writing: jot down the best ideas you have, and see of some of them seem to relate to each other in such a way that you can put them into an order that makes sense to you. Then write down that order. Are some of them more important, or bigger topics than others? Do some belong to others, as examples or illustrations? Arrange them on the page to reflect that. Can you see the structure of an essay emerging?
You might be finished pre-writing when you know what you want to say. Maybe you have a rough topic sentence. Maybe you’ve figured out where you want the paper to start. Maybe you know one idea that will be at the center of your paper. Then go ahead, get your pre-writing arranged around you and start DRAFTING. But stop drafting whenever you’re stuck. Don’t stare at the screen. Go back to pre-writing, open up new ideas, wait until you know where to go next. Then continue to DRAFT.