Drafting

When you brainstorm and use the other techniques for generating content, you are basically drafting. The proper drafting stage comes when you feel that you have gathered enough information and have a clear idea where you are heading, so it is now time to expand confidently. When drafting, you will often find that much of your planning will change. Drafting is when you put into practice the ideas you generated in the previous stage and see how they work in expanded form. Make yourself receptive to influences that can provide direction and inspiration: keep your topic in the back of your mind in your everyday activities. Read, watch, listen critically, and seize all that is productive for your purposes. Also, be open to serendipity – inspiration through sudden, previously unrecognized connections. Many great scientific and technical discoveries were made accidentally, by sudden awareness of previously unseen analogies. If you get stuck when drafting, do not attempt to complete the draft in one go. Instead, let it incubate by putting it on the ‘back burner’ of your mind and coming back to it later. The time lapse between giving up on a draft and coming back to it could be a few minutes, hours, overnight, or more depending on project deadlines, of course’ In the meantime, you can do something else that, even though it may seem irrelevant, allows your thoughts to gestate. In fact, in professional contexts more often than not you work on many projects simultaneously, so time management – and letting go of one project to move to another – become significant skills.