Personal Narrative: My Personal Writing Process

Personal Writing Process Narrative

My writing process has always been a mostly free form. Throughout my writing career, I did not think of myself as a writer with a process. When I was a young girl, I wrote intently. My writing consisted only of pieces of personal writing, and I spent most of my time between jotting thoughts in a journal, creating comics, and writing short stories. My mom could easily find me cozied up in a corner or a section of floor in my room writing hurriedly. I was always giddy from fun new ideas I had thought up yet somber as I was alone with my thoughts. I cherished only having to write for myself. For me, writing for myself made writing free flowing without a need for much structure or deliberate planning. In this

Even though some tactics gave poor results, this was mostly for a lack of an intentional process throughout those years. However, contrary to what I saw there was a process, but I was not thinking about writing intentionally. Now, in a place of higher academic there has been a need to take my “free-flowing” process a bit further. For this, my writing process has a balance between some of my old ways and implementing certain other constructive strategies. Thinking about my writing in terms of what it lacked and how that affected the result, has made me a more conscious and intentional writer, which improved my writing process. In many ways it is important for me to indulge in the things that come naturally and comfortably such as brainstorming, freewriting, stream of consciousness writing, and skipping around the page. I still utilize stream of consciousness style writing when I first get a prompt. I appreciate the time and space it allows me to get my thoughts down which is a necessary part to productivity. Beginning on those grounds establishes a foundation from which I can grow my writing. Nevertheless, it is equally important that I allow my writing to grow more thoughtfully from that foundation. While being more intentional, I am more conscious about audience which has made me pay attention to planning. Part of this planning includes that I frontload most of the work towards writing in this first stage. I spend a lot of my time trying to connect my ideas as much as possible. By doing this I can see flaws and revise my plan until it has sound structure. In turn, this can greatly improve organization and cohesion. Since it is not always possible to have others read my drafts, better planning allows me to be aware of how the information is conveyed. Rather than hanging on to my first ideas, I embrace the act of drafting and redrafting. Now the