Divide the writing process into four separate tasks

Do you feel anxious every time you sit down to write Your main difficulty is pro
bably figuring out how to begin. Don t
try to picture the completed piece before you ve gathered and organized your mater
ial. It s much too soon to think about
the final, polished product and you will just make the challenge ahead of you seem
overwhelming. The worry can take
more out of you than the actual writing.
Instead, break up your work. Think of writing not as one huge task but as a seri
es of smaller tasks. The poet,
writer, and teacher Betty Sue Flowers has envisioned them as belonging to differ
ent characters in your brain MACJ.1
That stands for Madman-Architect-Carpenter-Judge, representing the phases that a
writer must go through
The Madman gathers material and generates ideas.
The Architect organizes information by drawing up an outline, however simple.
The Carpenter puts your thoughts into words, laying out sentences and paragraphs
by following the Architect s
plan.
The Judge is your quality-control character, polishing the expression throughout e
verything from tightening
language to correcting grammar and punctuation.
You ll be most efficient if you carry out these tasks pretty much in this order. S
ure, you ll do some looping back.
For example, you may need to draft more material after you ve identified holes to
fill. But do your best to
compartmentalize the discrete tasks and address them in order.
Get the Madman started
Accept your good ideas gratefully whenever they come. But if you re methodical abo
ut brainstorming at the beginning
of the process, you ll find that more and more of your good ideas will come to you
early and you ll largely prevent the
problem of finally thinking of your best point after you ve finished and distribut
ed your document.
Get your material from memory, from research, from observation, from conversatio
ns with colleagues and others,
and from reasoning, speculation, and imagination. The problem you re trying to sol
ve may seem intractable, and you
may struggle to find a good approach. (How on earth will you persuade the folks
in finance to approve your budget
request when they re turning down requests left and right? How will you get the ex
ecutive board to adopt a new mindset
about a proposed merger?) Don t get hung up on the size of the challenge. Gatherin
g ideas and facts up front will
help you push through and defuse anxiety about the writing.
How do you keep track of all this preliminary material? In the old days, people
used index cards. (I wrote my first
several books that way.) But today the easiest way is to create a rough spreadsh
eet that contains the following:
Labels indicating the points you re trying to support.
The data, facts, and opinions you re recording under each point taking care to put d
irect quotes within quotation
marks.
Your sources. Include the title and page number if citing a book or an article,
the URL if citing an online source.
(When writing a formal document, such as a report, see The Chicago Manual of Sty
le for information on proper
sourcing.)
As you re taking notes, distinguish facts from opinions. Be sure to give credit wh

ere it s due. You ll run aground

if you claim others assertions as your own, because you ll probably be unable to ba
ck them up convincingly. Worse,
you ll be guilty of plagiarism.
This groundwork will save you loads of time when you re drafting and will help you
create a well-supported,
persuasive document.
Give the Carpenter a tight schedule
The key to writing a sound first draft is to write as swiftly as you can (you ll r
ead more about this in chapter 5). Later,
you ll make corrections. But for now, don t slow yourself down to perfect your wordi
ng. If you do, you ll invite writer s
block. Lock the Judge away at this stage, and try to write in a headlong rush.
Let the Architect take the lead
You may feel frustrated at first as you re groping for a way to organize your docu
ment. If a sensible approach doesn t
come to mind after you ve done your research and scouted for ideas, you may need t
o do more hunting and gathering.
You want to arrive at the point of writing down three sentences complete propositi
ons that convey your ideas. Then
arrange them in the most logical order from the reader s point of view (see chapte
r 4). That s your bare-bones outline,
which is all you typically need before you start drafting.
Call in the Judge
Once you ve got it all down, it s time for deliberation weighing your words, filling
in gaps, amplifying here and
curtailing there. Make several sweeps, checking for one thing at a time: the acc
uracy of your citations, the tone, the
quality of your transitions, and so on. (For an editorial checklist, see chapter
6.) If you try to do many things at once, you
won t be doing any of them superbly. So leave plenty of time for multiple rounds o
f editing at least as much time as
you spent researching and writing. You ll ferret out more problems, and you ll find
better fixes for them.