Take Charge of Your Writing Process

In a cartoon I saw once, a Hollywood producer summons his secretary. “I want to send a memo to the parking-lot attendant,” he bellows. “Get me a couple of writers.”

I sympathize. Writing is not often easy or fun, and those of us in business are usually too busy to give it the time it seems to demand. We’d all like to have staff writers on call, to handle those difficult letters and memos that seem to pile up.

Most of us, however—even in large organizations—have to be our own “writing department.” We have to take personal responsibility for the stream of writing tasks that cross our desks.

That’s probably as it should be. As entrepreneur Richard Saul Wurman, president of Access Press, says, “You shortchange yourself if you think that writing is ‘someone else’s problem.’ . . . Even if your job description says nothing about writing, by regarding yourself as a writer, even privately, you can take advantage of the discipline of the craft.”

What probably keeps most of us from regarding ourselves as writers is the belief that the ability to write well is a talent, or a gift. For some, it surely is: the great novelist, poet, or playwright is doubtless born as much as made. But the everyday business writing that you and I do—the writing that gets the world’s work done—requires no special gift. It can be managed, like any other business process.

Managing writing is largely a matter of managing time. Writing is a process, and like any process it can be done efficiently or inefficiently. Unfortunately, most of us have a pretty inefficient writing process. That’s because we try to get each word, each sentence, right the first time. Given a letter to write, we begin with the first sentence, thinking about what to write, writing it, revising it, even checking its spelling, before going on to the second sentence. In an hour of writing, we might spend 45 or 50 minutes doing this kind of detailed drafting, with only a few minutes of overall planning at the beginning and only a few minutes of overall revising at the end.

That’s like building a house by starting with the front door: planning, building, finishing it—even washing the window in it—before doing anything with the rest of the house. No wonder most of us have so much trouble writing.

Efficient, effective writers take better charge of their writing time; they manage their writing. Like building contractors, they spend time planning before they start construction, and once they’re into construction, they don’t try to do all the finishing touches as they go.

Many good writers break their writing process into three main stages—planning, drafting, and revising—with more time spent at the first and third stages than at the second. They also build in some “management” time at the beginning and the end, and some break time in the middle. To manage your writing time, try the following steps:

At the managing stage (perhaps 2 or 3 minutes for a one-hour writing job), remind yourself that writing can be managed, and that it’s largely a matter of managing time. Plan your next hour.

At the planning stage (perhaps 20 minutes out of the hour),

1. Find the “we.” Define the community to which you and your reader belong. Decide how you are alike and different in knowledge, attitude, and situation.

2. Make holes, not drills—as a consultant once told Stanley Tool executives. That is, focus on the outcome you want, not on the means you will use to achieve it. Define your purpose.

3. Get your stuff together. Collect the information you’ll use in your writing.

4. Get your ducks in a row. Organize your information, so that you can give it to your reader in the most useful order.

At the drafting stage (perhaps 5 minutes out of the hour),
5. Do it wrong the first time. Do a “quick and dirty” draft, without editing.

At the break stage (perhaps 5 minutes),
6. Take a break and change hats. Get away from your draft, even if for only a few minutes, and come back with a fresh perspective—the reader’s perspective.

At the revising stage (perhaps 25 minutes),
7. Signal your turns. Just as if you were driving a car, you’re leading your reader through new territory. Use “turn signals” to guide your reader from sentence to sentence.

8. Say what you mean. Put the point of your sentences in the subjects and verbs.

9. Pay by the word. Make your sentences economical.

10. Translate into English. Keep your words simple. (Lee Iacocca put both these tips in one “commandment of good management”: “Say it in English and keep it short.”)

11. Finish the job. Check your spelling, punctuation, and mechanics.

Finally, at the managing stage again (2 to 3 minutes),
12. Manage your writing. Evaluate the process you’ve just finished. Figure out how to improve it next time.

So begin today to manage your writing. As United Technologies Corporation said in a Wall Street Journal ad, “If you want to manage somebody, manage yourself. Do that well and you’ll be ready to stop managing and start leading.”

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