I have been a writer for many years and this is how I make a living. And despite what many people think, writing is work. I don’t sit at home every day doing nothing. I’m working, but I don’t work all day.

Every week I write thousands of words on my websites, blogs, emails, freelance work, books, e-books, journals, planning, outlines, research, and more.

So how do I do it?

I have a five step process that I follow. I’ve been a writer for so long that I’ve honed my processes for each type of writing I do to make it faster and easier. Writing is like anything we do in that it gets easier with practice, plus we automatically get faster.

My five-step process goes like this:

Idea – plan/sketch – research – writing – editing.

Idea. Any writing project starts with an idea. I never like to miss any because they disappear as fast as they appear, so I write down each and every one even if I don’t need it right away. It’s great to have a notebook of ideas to navigate.

Plan/Scheme. Every writing project (or any project) needs a plan, also known as an outline. Even if I don’t have all the information I need, I’ll add notes about what I need to research to complete the project. Which leads to the next step.

Investigation. Once I know exactly what I’m going to write about, I do the necessary research, which can be as simple as finding a suitable citation or looking up how other people approached a particular problem I’m writing about.

Write. This is the fun part. With my outline open at my side, I work it my way, writing everything I want to cover, and also adding my research notes in the appropriate places. If I’m writing fiction, I still use an outline and sometimes need to do research to check the facts.

Edit. This is the final step and should always be done last. I never edit as I write. Even when I think I’m wrong I keep writing and I don’t stop to correct anything. If I can’t spell a word, I misspell it or leave a blank space. I also try to allow at least a couple of days between writing and editing so that I can read it with ‘fresh eyes’. And I usually find that every time I thought I was doing badly with my writing, I wasn’t. I was too close to him at the time.

And that’s my five-step process.

The most important thing to remember is that writing will not do itself, no matter how much we would like to.

So you have to apply the butt to the chair and start writing.

Getting started is often the hardest. Doing something is easy. Getting started can be difficult.

But once you start, you will find that you can easily write thousands of words every day.

And below is the appropriate citation I researched for this writing:

“The secret to getting ahead is to start.”

~Mark Twain