Planning Stage
Those of us who are serious about writing have probably for a long time been listing ideas for essays, scribbling dialogue for playscripts, storyboarding or drafting treatments of screenplays, describing scenes for poems, and synopsizing novels. Now's the time to pull out those notes from years ago, see what's changed since then, and add or delete as needed to keep those plans fresh. Maybe such a review will send us to the library, our own bookshelves, or online to cultivate our research on those plans, adding to the content of our notes and sharpening the focus of our premise.
Drafting Stage
Moving beyond the planning stage, we can choose to draft a few pages of our writing project: more dialogue, observations about the characters, twists in the plot, extra layers to the context. During this stage, we are not expecting much more than to produce content.
Rewriting Stage
Suppose we have a draft that seems complete but has not found a home in a publication or a production company. We can reread our draft critically with an eye for trying to see why it hasn't seen the light of publication or production. This approach in no way suggests that our piece needs improvement (although it probably does). In fact, the practice gives us a chance to keep working at our craft. Chances are we'll want something new, something more, or maybe something less, in our piece.
