A client once shared with me that when she thinks about writing something new she feels dread. (yes, DREAD!)
As a seasoned professional, internationally renowned with decades of experience under her belt, she uses writing as a regular part of her work – grant writing, project proposals, website copy, among so many other things. And yet, she dreaded the idea of starting a writing project.
“How do I start?” she asked, “Actually, where do I start??”
If you have similar feelings of dread, fear not!
While certainly not the only way to start to write, here is my preferred method of starting a non-fiction project (including academic, or any research-based writing, as well as more complex professional writing):
Start in the middle and work your way out.
If this sounds like chaos, it’s really not. Here me out.
Let’s say you’ve made good headway into the first stage of your process – you’ve done some research or exploratory work, and you have a sense of what you need to include. (If you’re interested to know more about the three stages of writing, you can access a pdf of my Writing Roadmap here – full disclosure, you’ll also be signing up for my newsletter).
But now the time has come to actually put metaphorical pen to paper (or, start stage two – writing itself). But where to begin? You have all these ideas!?! Where and how to begin to organize them!?!
Overwhelming, right? My advice?
Pick your most resonant idea, and write it down.
Don’t worry if that first idea is the “best” idea, or the clearest idea, or even if it’s terrible. Don’t worry about your main argument, or how you will wrap up with a conclusion. Just get at least one idea down on the page. Now you have something to work with. Then, drawing from your research and exploratory stage, you can then put down other ideas around that first idea.
Writing is an analytic and creative process. There is uncertainty about what the specific and final outcome will be. Given this, sometimes the important thing is to put down the ideas you are most certain about, even if you are not very certain.
It can be powerful to start to see your ideas in front of you, because then you can start to move them around. You start to almost literally “see” them differently, and thus understand them differently. As you critically assess the ideas and words, you will start to see more clearly how they’re related, including which ideas are most relevant and which are extraneous. You can add or remove language to highlight the relationships.
The structure of the writing project forms as you analyse the ideas and their relationships. You will start to make decisions about what ideas should introduce or follow others to help your reader follow. As the structure forms, you will also start to comprehend where the holes are – and you can fill these in. For ideas that are still early or not yet fully formed, adding a placeholder statement like “Add paragraph here about the ways creativity is embodied” (or whatever) will trigger your memory when you return to that idea/paragraph at a later time.
Again, the idea is to get something down, and move through a process of linking ideas by expanding and removing language, working towards structure and clarity for your reader.
To sum up
It’s true that sometimes the “just leap blindly” approach can work when you feel that you are avoiding writing – but I think that’s rare and it’s not what I’m advocating for here. I think some planning and preparing for your writing can help you feel less overwhelmed (I’ll flag my Writing Roadmap again, which can help with planning).
As I mentioned earlier, writing is an analytic and creative process; but it is also iterative. It is not always linear (in fact, I have rarely found it linear). If you do become overwhelmed or confused during the process, there is nothing stopping you from taking a step back. In fact, I would encourage it. The overwhelm and the confusion can feel frustrating, but it is totally normal. Don’t despair! And don’t give up.