It’s an absolute crime how pre-writing is so overlooked in the writing world. Have you read Stephen King’s On Writing? That was one of my favorite writing books as a kid and I took his advice as gospel. One of the tenets of his book was that too much outlining and prewriting killed the story, which made me instantly afraid of killing my story before I could discover it through the actual process of writing.

Now, I admire Stephen King and his Everything’s Eventual short story collection is beyond my absolute favorite short story collection of all time. However, the complete lack of pre-writing is evident in his long-winded books and out-of-place endings.

In movies — and especially television — you don’t have the luxury of writing hundreds of pages without a shred of an idea of what’s happening next.

So consider this my own series “On Writing.” Or, “On Pre-writing” I suppose. [Read more…]