Transcripts
1. Introduction: hi and welcome to designing your writing process. If there are days where you struggle to put words on the page, then this class might be for you. I'm John Fallen. Write both fiction and nonfiction books for publishers including Scholastic and O. Reilly Media. My latest sci fi book for young readers is called Marvin and the Moths, and you can check it out and Marvin in the moth's dot com. If you're interested in technology like genomics and robotics, you might want to check out design emerging tech dot com, which is the home of my book Designing for Emerging Technologies. Or if you're interested in following me on Twitter, you can find me at John. Fall it. That's jail when f O l l E t T. Throughout my career, I've borrowed techniques from one area of creative practice and apply them to another. So in this class, I'm gonna teach you some techniques that have borrowed from design practice and apply them to writing. We're gonna take a system design approach to the writing process. We're going to examine it in its entirety, break it up, analyze it and hopefully prototypes of new ideas for improving it. This class is perfect for hobbyists, freelancers or professional writers who just want a new perspective on the writing process . I encourage you to follow me on my skill share profile, so let's get started.
2. Taking a System View: what are some of the benefits of looking at your writing process as a system? Well, for starters, when you take this you point. You can see how some elements of your writing system are working together and how some of them are not. I want you to ask the question as we examine each phase in your writing process. How could I approach this differently? What's a different path I could take? What's a new way that I could do this, coupled with some ideas that we're gonna borrow from design practice, namely, prototyping feedback, innit? Oration hopefully will come to some conclusions around areas that could be improved. I want to start, though, by examining the four typical phases in the writing process. Will use this as the scaffold to build the system diagram of your writing process. Now, if you're writing poetry or nonfiction, if you're writing articles or now ALS, you're probably exercising these four phases, whether you call them what I'm gonna call them or something else. These are research, ideation, drafting and revision with research. There are three core elements that I want to talk about. First is sourcing. This is where you get your research from? So are you researching online? Are you interviewing people pretty watching movies? Are you reading newspapers? What's the source for your research? Next. How are you capturing it? How are you recording the research that you're doing? And lastly, how are you integrating that into your writing process? All of these air important in research next phase is ideation. That's that. Ah ha Moment. The great discovery, the big revelation that you have as you begin writing. So if you're writing nonfiction, that might be When you develop your thesis, draw all the threads together into the perfect thesis for your article. If you're writing fiction, perhaps that's when you come up with a great plot point or some new characters that you really enjoy. Ideation like research needs to be captured and integrated into your process. Now for myself, I borrow a lot of techniques from design. Tell capture that Ah ha moment. Where and when that happens, we'll talk about that a little later. In this class, the next step is drafting, which could be difficult for someone like me who really likes the ideation part. But in drafting, you're essentially getting all those words down on the page or on the screen. So for some like me, you might just do a brain dump and just type away until you get all the sentences down. Other people like a more structured outline to begin their drafting. Regardless, drafting convey be both exciting and frustrating as you see your words come out for the first time and lastly, is the revision phase. Revision is key to great writing. It's all about editing, making your writing clear and concise for your audience. Revision also contains when you're making a spelling or grammatical changes as well. The copy editing part. So each of these phases works with the other research works with ideation, works with drafting and revision to create the peace that should write it. As I said earlier, we're gonna use this as the scaffold for recording your writing process, which will start in the next video
3. What's Your Writing Process: And now for the fun part. What does your writing process look like in this exercise? We're going to document its current state so we can analyze it and this mapping exercise you're gonna need a few things. Some sticky notes, some sharpies, some colored sticky dots and also a white board or poster board for displaying your results . The exercise should take you about 20 minutes or less, depending on how much you want to break it down. You'll begin by writing down each step in your writing process. One step for sticky note and putting that in a pile on your desk or table in front of you were gonna categorize those later. You're gonna want to think about your writing process sequentially so you can capture as many elements as possible. Sometimes it's easier to begin with the high points, the points in your process that you can remember and then go back and fill in the details. Another sticky notes as you remember them. Let me help you with that. How did you get started with your writing? Is it a moment of inspiration? Is it a call from your editor with an assignment? Where is it something else altogether. Whatever it may be, write that down on your sticking out and ask yourself what's next? Once you have that assignment or that idea, how do you die, then? For me, it's often exploration, so this might mean and going to the library or going online and doing research. We're just looking for ideas that I can incorporate into the work as a whole. As you're writing these ideas down, you want to ask yourself, Can I break down this step any further? How do I conduct this stuff? What does it mean and what's next? Once you think you've captured all of the steps on that pile of sticky notes, the next thing we want to dio is categorized, um, on your whiteboard or on your poster board, you can put them in the broad categories that we discussed in the last lesson, which is, if you remember our research, ideation, drafting and revision, or if there are other broad categories that you want to expand into. That's fine, too, and the order is not particularly important. The idea is that once you visualize thes categories and the sticky notes that go in these categories, Gorey's showing you your writing process, you'll begin to understand better what it looks like now in preparation for the next segment. In this course, you're gonna want to use those colored sticky dots toe mark, where you're doing well in the process and where you think you can use some improvement. I like to use the green dots to indicate where I'm doing well and the red dots for the areas where I need some work. Congratulations. You've just mapped out your writing process in indicated areas where he could use some work that's really valuable.
4. Where Can You Do Better: in this segment, we're going to talk a little bit about the class assignment toe work on this assignment. Please download the PdF worksheet that's included with the course on skill share. Once you open up the pdf, you'll see that it has three columns. The first column problem areas. The Second solutions In the third feedback, let's talk about problem areas if you remember in the last segment, we mapped out the entirety of the writing process in sticky notes, writing down different parts of it on each sticky, and we also marked particular stickies that indicated areas in the process where we could improve. I want you to take those areas that you marked and transfer those over to the four different slots of the problem area. So these four problem areas we're going to work on for the rest of class. For me, those areas all fall into drafting, for instance, Sometimes I get distracted or not in the right frame line to draft a new piece. I can also have trouble getting sentences down on the page initially and expanding those sentences into complete paragraphs to build out a piece. I'm an ideas guy, so I really like the ideation and research part of writing, drafting his hard work. So sometimes that's not my favorite part. That's the part of my writing process that I'm gonna work on, and we'll all have different areas where were interested in working the next step. The solution stuff is a little bit more difficult. You want to brainstorm some solutions over the rest of the course of this class? I'm going to go over different possible techniques that you could borrow in the next four segments. Techniques for research techniques, for ideation, for drafting and for revision. So don't worry if you haven't brainstorm your solutions right away. Well, hopefully find some for you. The last part is feedback. I encourage you to prototype your solution for a week. Try out something new based on some of the techniques that were going to be going through. Once you experiment with those, write down your feedback, and if they work to incorporate them into your process, it's not. Maybe they could use a little tweaking a little it oration to make them better. So now we're ready. Let's dive into some of those techniques
5. Research: For some writers, research is conducted entirely up front and complete before writing really starts in earnest. But for others like myself, research can run the entirety of the writing process. I borrowed some techniques from my design practice to make the research phase of my right and go a little more smoothly. If your problem area in writing is related to research, you might want to borrow some of these tactics. Let's start by talking about display boards. If you're a visual thinker, categorizing or organizing information on a display board could be useful to you. If you're writing fiction, perhaps you'd like a display board for each of your characters, where you can put all of the research, inspiration and background info into one spot for each character or for a nonfiction. If you're interviewing people for a piece, you may want to display board for each of those people so this you can organize their information. In that way, I find display boards very helpful. Similarly, there is a technique called the War Room, where you collect all of your research information for the project in one physical spot. Now, sometimes it's hard to find that space it could be a hallway in your office. It could be your home office where you have enough walls that are blank and you could fill up with all that information. But the human mind really responds to both the location of the information and the information itself. So by hanging papers, posters etcetera on the wall at having one spot where the information resides in physical space activates a different part of your brain than just storing it on the computer. Try it out. It's a lot of fun, all of the information on the walls for a particular project. It's called the War Room Technique, and I really enjoy it. Lastly, I want to mention when you're collecting a lot of online research that it's useful to have some kind of repository to store it all. For me, the Mac software product Keynote serves that purpose. What's so great about Keynote is that I can drag and drop from the Web browser directly onto slides and then organize those slides with all the different media in whatever categories that I wish. Keynote is surprisingly easy to manipulate and Teoh organize your repository of research information, so check it out. So those are the three tactics that I'd suggest for organizing her research in a better way . The war room technique is my favorite display boards. Air great, too. And, of course, using some sort of digital repo for all your research, like Kino or even Power Point can be useful.
6. Ideation: here will be discussing some fun techniques for capturing that ah ha moment, that moment of inspiration, where and when it happens. Nobel Prize winning scientists Linus Pauling said. The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. I think that's true of science and of writing as well. For writers, it's part and parcel of our process, the leverage, our creativity into something great that we can write for others. But that's often easier said than done. In fact, creative movements are fleeting at best, and we can't turn them on and off. If you think creativity is the melding and molding of ideas into something new, then you'll know that a relaxed mindset is really necessary for that to happen. Writers can go for long walks or runs or swims just to get into that mindset. You can have that mindset when you're just going to bed or just waking up or even standing in the shower. So if creative moments are fleeting and difficult to pin down, how can we have a disciplined approach to capturing them? Well, here are a few techniques, variations on ones you're probably familiar with, and maybe some that you'll find to be new. First off, even in this digital age, I recommend that as a writer, you should carry a notebook. I find the black Mole Skeen notebook, which is 3.5 inches wide, by 5.5 inches tall and fits perfectly into your jeans pocket. To be very useful, you can get them plain lined or his graph paper, and they've been used by such artists as Vincent van Gogh and writers like Irma's Ernest Hemingway. So how can you go wrong? So whenever you have a great idea whether you're in transit or just getting done with a run or whatever that maybe you can pull out your notebook and write it down. In fact, if that's something you already dio, I would recommend sketching your idea as well. It may open new avenues for your creative output and give you greater and better ideas. Now, if you like notebooks, you know that you can't always use them, especially if you're going for a swim or ah, hike in the rain. Or worse yet, if you're kidding out of the shower, you don't want water. All of her notebook but There are notebooks that are made especially for use in what conditions for the building trades. There's a notebook that I like called right in the rain. All weather. Now the pages of that notebook are covered with a special coating, so it's easy to write on and it's waterproof. That's perfect for writers who liked to swim to get new ideas. Now, once you've got ideas in all these notebooks, how do you transfer them to a digital format? I like using genius Scam Plus for my iPhone, which lets me take a picture and allows me to convert it into the PdF format so I can put it on my computer. You may find other APS that do the same. Lastly, I want to mention that conversing about new ideas with your friends and other writers is another great way of capturing your creativity. There are so many conversations that I have with colleagues that I would love to remember once I'm done with them. I mean, remember over the long term, so recording those on your iPhone or a digital recorder could be very useful. I like the transcription service rev dot com for transcribing all my recordings. So whether they're a conversation with a colleague or an interview with an interview subject or just a random set of notes that I've recorded into my iPhone, I find transcribing into the digital format to be very useful. Hopefully, these ideas for Catherine creativity can be helpful to you as well.
7. Drafting: and now we come to drafting. Drafting is one of most important parts of the writing process, and it can be among the most difficult as well. I know that I can find it hard to draft a peace day after day and find the time, energy and motivation to do that. So how do you tackle this? I like a technique called Time boxing, which I borrowed from software design and development practice. Specifically, it's part of a practice called agile Project Management. There are plenty of articles online about time boxing, but especially effective for managing creative tasks. The theory behind it is fairly simple. You estimate an amount of time for a task and then execute that task in the amount of time you estimated and no more. So it confines the task to a particular time blocks. Hence the name. It's good for creative practice because it forces you to avoid perfectionism, apply focus and motivation to a task in front of you. I like to schedule out my day in 30 minute time boxes. I do this scheduling in the morning. I apply 25 minutes of work and then followed by a five minute break and divide up my morning save from 9 to 12 PM in such a manner. Then following lunch, I evaluate my remaining tasks and then apply the same technique in half hour chunks. This forces me to evaluate my priorities in real time. Now, you may have a great idea of your priorities already, so you might be able to schedule an entire day. This way. I encourage you to try out the time boxing technique and adjust it to meet your needs. I find that I'm most creative in the morning, so I mostly put my creative tests then and then do more administrative tests in the afternoon. But your mileage may vary time. Boxing is extremely useful once you get the hang of it, but I would encourage you to try it out a couple times. Uh, estimation. Generally speaking, can be hard to dio, so you may find that you need to try a few times before you get it just right. The 30 minute increments are useful because it follows a natural pattern for applying work and then rest in between. So I would encourage you to try out time boxing for your drafting. It's been very helpful for May
8. Revision: revision is absolutely key to good writing. Most writers won't write something completely brilliant on the first pass. There may be a few of those writers in the world, but you can probably count those on your fingers. The rest of us need Teoh edit need to make sure our ideas air clear that the audience understands those ideas and that everything is copy edited correctly. The spellings right, the grammars, right, etcetera. I take a minimalist approach to my writing process, so I'm usually cutting about half of all the words that I draft. I'm always asking. Does this duplicate something else in the piece? Does this move the article or the short story or whatever it is in writing forward? Do I really need this piece of writing? One technique that's been very useful for May is to consider re architect ing apiece during the revision process. What I mean by that is taking different sections of the peace and reordering them so that the peace might read. Definitely, I like to write in 350 word chunks, which is about one page worth of writing, and then rearrange those chunks as needed. During the revision process. I use a piece of software called Ulysses for the Mac that helps me do that. It encourages writing in this way. But you can use Google docks for Microsoft Word and just consider that each page that you write each chunk could be repositioned elsewhere. Sometimes it's fun to reward of the peace and see how it reads on. Then try it again in a different way. I found that to be very helpful. Another piece of advice I recommend for the revision process is to develop a group of writers and editors who can give you feedback. You're writing network. It's always important to get outside feedback, an outside perspective on your writing. I have a couple different networks that I use, depending on whether I'm writing fiction or nonfiction. My creative writing is viewed by some folks in my technical writing another group. Even if you already have a few people who check out your writing right now, I'd suggest you develop a broader group that can look at it. These people will not only help you edit help, you get good feedback, but they also can improve your writing career
9. Conclusion: now that we've reached conclusion of designing your writing process, what's next? Well, if you haven't already, I'd encourage you to use one of the tactics for techniques that we've discussed during the class. You can prototype it for a week and write down your feedback on the provided worksheet. Once you've done that, you should upload that so other folks in the class can check it out. I really encourage you to try out time boxing for managing your time or, if you aren't already using a notebook or journal to record your creative inspiration. Both of that. Those techniques have been very helpful for May. Remember that your writing process is going to change over time, so it's worth revisiting every six months or every year. In fact, I'd suggest that you put in a calendar reminder right now so that in six months or a year, you picked the amount of time you can come back and revisit your writing process to see if it's still working for you. I hope that you found a technique or a tactic that's useful for you, and thank you so much for watching the skill share video
Jonathan Follett, Author and Designer
