The part that I'm nervous about when using the expanded writing process presented in this course is the extensive drafting and editing and planning, whereas I usually start with an idea and go right to writing, and usually I don't make multiple drafts. The story that I write originally is the story that gets finished and becomes final, although some revising and editing of typos and awkward sentences is required to perfect the story. There typically is a period of a few weeks where the story is in "review mode", but normally I don't make a major overhaul of the story and start a completely new draft. This aspect of the expanded writing process seems a bit too time-intensive to me, especially since I may begin to forget some of the bright ideas I had in the beginning after too long, and they may begin to get stale if I keep writing them over and over and over again, and then reading them over and over again. This usually leads to me losing interest in that particular story that I wrote, and then being unable to continue it.
Since the only aspects of my current process that need to change over to the new process are the drafting and the editing, I am mostly open to trying the new techniques that are being presented in this course. My only concern, however, is that writing will take much longer and ideas will become stale if repeated and written over many times. This is why I think I could use the Writing Process as presented in this course if I make a small modification: I would want to change how the story is drafted. I could first invent an idea, then write the story itself, then review and finally make any edits. I would simply be removing one step from the writing process, and I think I would be able to switch over to the new way quite easily if I took out that step. There are certainly circumstances where I would skip other steps as well because of the excitement of getting ideas out; for example, I could get an amazing idea and skip the planning stage altogether, and then get so excited about the story being published that I would forget to do a thorough revision. This is very possible, although it's rare that I would go so far as to forget to revise and check for typos and things like that.
Even though some aspects of this new writing process will take larger amounts of time than I'm used to, I'm still fairly likely to use them, though perhaps not all the time. There will be some cases with some writing assignments where I skip the planning process or the revising process as mentioned above, but most of the time I think I will remember to use it, since the time impact will be noticeable but still minimal. I believe that using these techniques will greatly improve the quality of all writing I do.
And that's all for Writer's Journal #6.
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