$1k Blog

I’ll kick-off the first part of my Post-Mortem series with some general observations of pre-writing - what it is, how you should use it and why it can make your writing job that little bit easier.

First off, what on earth is pre-writing, anyway? Those involved in IM (Internet Marketing) are probably (hopefully) familiar with the concept of pre-selling - getting your customer into the right state of mind to buy your products. Well, pre-writing is pretty much the same thing, except that it involves getting you into the right state of mind to do your job and actually write on what you are paid to do.

But pre-writing is more than just gathering your wits about you and firing up Microsoft Word - it’s all about planning your content and doing preliminary research. When you’re working on a small piece, you can easily (re)write as you go, doing all the research you need along the way. However, if you’re dealing with a particularly big project - like I was for the last 3 weeks - you seriously need to do pre-writing.

The goal of pre-writing is to give you an overview of the subject you need to cover, as well as some sub-topics to structure it around. Large topics generally contain lots of information and if you’re not planning ahead, all this information overload will pretty much get out of control and you’ll find yourself writing much more than you need to. Pre-writing basically helps you identify topics that you will need to cover as part of your work.

For example, let’s say you accept a job to write about Belarus (my home country). Sure, you can just start writing general stuff - but don’t be surprised if a few days later you will notice your writing spiraling out of control and losing any sense of directions, with some of the topics becoming completely bloated and others remaining entirely underdeveloped. Quite apart from this imbalance, you will also probably miss some of the more important - yet less obvious - topics about Belarus, such as, for instance, the impact of the Chernobyl disaster.

Now, what would it look like if you were to do pre-writing? You’d start off by doing some rudimentary research on the subject, maybe taking some notes along the way. You won’t be going into too much detail - you’ll be doing that later as you write - but you will have a rough idea of what’s going on in Belarus and what topics deserve special consideration. You could, for example, write a few pages on Chernobyl or on the opposition to the country’s current dictatorial government. Because you already have an idea of the subject at hand, you will be able to integrate content better by making references to other parts of your work or to subtopics that you have yet to write about. You will retain complete control of the direction of your work, because you already have a rough idea of what topics you need to cover and how much content you can allocate to each. Sure, you could write a book about Chernobyl alone - but, chances are,  you have a deadline to meet, and that means providing compelling, interesting and relevant content that briefly touches on everything without going into too much detail on any particular topic on time.

Pre-writing is something I didn’t do at the beginning, and, in retrospect, I paid for it dearly with a missed deadline and overbloated, overdetailed subtopics. For example, I was planning to write so much on one subtopic that even my client said it was unnecessary (and they wanted lots of content) - of course, that time could have been spend focusing on the remaining parts of my assignment.

So, my advice to you is pre-write, pre-write, pre-write! By knowing in advance where you’re going and what topics you are covering, you’ll stay in control of the creative process and ensure that all your topics are balanced in the amount of content they include. There’s nothing worse than reading an e-book on Belarus with 20 pages on demographics and only 2 on economics.