The Process of Writing a Draft

So far I have four paragraphs, the first of which serves as more of a hook to draw people into reading. The following two paragraphs state my experiences with writing stories. The last paragraph is about my new idea to combine the chapters I've already written into one novel. After that paragraph, I hope to get into how I can improve and combine them.

While I write I'm also revising and rereading it to make sure it sounds right. This is why it's taken me an hour to write two paragraphs. In fact, it took me about that long to tear myself away from re-revising the first paragraph. Originally I had included extra details about other careers that I avoided because of their financial instability. However, I saw that they were unneeded and started to steer my draft off-topic.

A Reflection on the Process of Prewriting

Today I was told to list ten jobs I could see myself doing in five years. He also told us to write a list of ten beliefs, but I didn't do it. It took me a while to think of ten jobs, but I did it by the end of the time he gave us. At first I chose the librarian as my first freewrite, as it was the first job I remember ever wanting to do. When he told us to pick another, however, I was drawn towards the tenth job on my list: the author. I see the author as the least stable job on my list and more of a dream that probably wont come true (or at least the way I want it to). I also listed some questions I have about the job and made a cluster with the word "Author" in the middle. He also told us to brainstorm, but I haven't done that yet either.

All of the methods I used got me thinking about the subject in different ways. In the freewrite I thought my first exposure to the jobs. While clustering I thought about specific authors I liked and the perks to being a well-known author. However, the questions got me thinking in more than the usual ways about becoming an author. I starting thinking about my preconceptions and things I really want to know. Even though I was given a limited amount of time to prewrite, I know that I tend to make paragraphs out of simple questions and freewrite naturally without getting too off-topic.

In contrast, the clustering brought out the more trivial things that I can't research very well. I like to have things organized, and a cluster seemed to be lacking just that. Something that goes with one thought bubble had just as much a right to the other and if I connected them I'd have a mess of crossing lines on my paper. If I had a web that worked like the genealogy trees on MyHeritage, this problem would be solved. However, there is also knowing when to stop pre-writing and get down to writing. This becomes hard for me as I could ramble on a subject for quite a while without knowing when to stop.