Pre-writing

Pre-writing has always been kind of a challenge for me. It seems that I have tried all of the different strategies over the years and still the organized planning of most of them only seems like extra work with little outcome. The pre-writing skill that has worked the best for me is literally just to start writing a rough draft. In fact, I actually call it writing a rough, rough draft. It is where I have my main ideas down on paper and just begin writing anything and everything about them. As I continue writing about the main ideas, my mind becomes a bit more active and I start going off of tangents and thinking of other ideas that could possibly work in my paper. From there on out, the ideas start to flow a lot easier and I begin to form a paper. After I feel that I have enough information, I re-read what I wrote and start organizing and editing to give it actual structure and make it possible for anyone to read it. Maybe one day another pre-writing skill might click for me and I will start using it, but for now I'm sticking with my old habits and hopefully that works out for me.