For many, sitting down and writing comes naturally; for others, it's hard work. What many people don’t realize is that there is a natural process to writing and many will follow that process without even thinking about it. If you are a new writer, or you really struggle to produce anything worth reading, then it might be worth you learning what this process is and making the effort to follow it.

Over the course of this mini-series, I will go over what that process is, how you do it and give you a few tips to give you a push if you are still stuck.

Step 1 – Prewriting

How many times have you stared at a blank document in Word or an empty sheet of paper? How long do you stare at it before you either give up or something suddenly pops into your head? Much of this is down to missing step one of the writing process – prewriting. Prewriting is where you do everything necessary before you come up with your first draft and that means as an absolute minimum, coming up with your idea!

Ideas are everywhere if you know where to look or what to look for. You need to look at the world with new eyes and with an open mind but, if you are still stuck and can't find an idea try these:

Try a writing burst. Write down any stimulus you can think of and then set yourself 10 minutes to write nonstop about it. You might find several ideas generated this way.

Think about things that happened in your childhood or something that happened to you recently and write about it.

Keep a notebook with you at all times and write down any ideas that come to you throughout the day or night.

Imagine a vivid character in your mind and write about that character.

Once you’ve got your idea you must expand on it – do NOT jump straight into writing about it because your work will not be structured properly. There are a couple of things you can do to build your idea including:

Freewriting. Start a clean page or a new document and jot down anything and everything that comes into your mind about your idea. Forget about editing, just write.

Brainstorming. Write down your idea in the middle of a page and then write down any new ideas that come from it. These could form directions you can go in or subtitles that you will use.

Once you’ve done this, either of them or both, the next step is in choosing what will make it into your first rough draft and this is where planning and structure come into play.

Some writing needs to be planned more than others, usually the longer pieces or academic work. First, you need to decide which of your ideas you are going to use so go through your freewriting and your brainstorming and pick the ones that fit; the rest can be used for other work later on.

Next, work out how you are going to structure the ideas. You need some kind of logic here and how easy that is will depend on the type of work you are producing. Once you have done that you can move on to step 2 of the writing process.