Writing mindsets

The writing process can loosely be divided into five activities:

1. Researching: Asking questions, designing experiments, collecting information.
2. Thinking: Making sense of all the information, answering questions.
3. Planning: Deciding what to write (for a specific audience), outlining.
4. Drafting: Writing the draft.
5. Revising: Gathering feedback and making changes to improve, edit, and polish the draft.

It helps to keeps these activities separate — or at least be aware of which activity you’re doing. This is tricky, because they all look the same: sitting at a computer and staring at a screen.

Tip: Have a look at this short article by English professor Betty. S Flowers from 1981¹. In it, she explains four different mindsets and how you can apply them during the writing process².

Footnotes

1. Flowers, B.S. (1981) ‘Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge: Roles and the Writing Process’, Language Arts, 58(7,), pp. 834–836. ↩

2. Here, I would apply madman to thinking, architect to planning, carpenter to drafting, and judge to revising. ↩