My Process

Every semester I teach my Academic Writing students that the writing process is more important than the final product, itself. This confuses them, usually, and many of them don't believe it. They want to pump out a rough draft in half an hour and turn it in as the final product. It meets length requirements, why shouldn't that count? Because writing is a process, and if you keep the focus on process and not product, you stand a much better chance of that final product being something worthwhile (and of actually having a good time, too).

In my opinion, this is even MORE true of creative writing, because if you're not doing it for the process (if you're doing it, for example, because you want to be "a writer" and you think it's going to make you tons of money and fame), well, you're doing it for the wrong reasons and your product, ultimately, will probably not be very good, anyway. If you don't enjoy the process, why do you want to write at all?

My process is very regimented. At any given moment, I usually have numerous writing projects I'm working on at once (all of which I'm always really excited about), so in order to keep focused and keep my brain from exploding, I keep close track of everything I do and set goals for myself on a monthly basis.

I keep an Excel Spreadsheet where I log everything that I do related to writing, and at the beginning of each month I set new goals for what I'd like to accomplish by the end of the month (I tried doing this daily but I found that if I missed the mark on one day I would lose my resolve and start slacking off for the next several days, as well).

I don't follow such a strict process because I don't enjoy writing and have to force myself to do it, or because I actually think it matters in any real way whether or not I meet my goals by the end of the month. I do it because, for me, that's what writing is about. Doing the actual writing. It's fun and I like it, and I like to keep track of what I've done and what I will do because otherwise I may forget, or get confused, or think that I've done nothing all month because I only have one finished story but in fact I've spent hours and hours revising and revising and revising that one story. I keep track of everything I do because, to me, that's the point of it all, the doing it, not the product. The process IS the product.