Source: How to be a Writer by Barbara Baig

Tools for Developing your Material

The following practices are tools that will help a person engage constructively with material being collected:

• Select
• Question
• Focus
• Picture
• Consider genre
• Learn
• Plan
• Take your time
• Organize the material
• Connect
• Write a zero draft

Your Relationship with Readers

The following material will give you some ideas about how to reclaim your power as a writer, while at the same time showing you how to use other people to help you develop a piece of writing:

• Take your time
• Develop your writer’s power
• Choose to share
• Establish a natural relationship with readers
• Practice using the new model: write to readers not for them
• Use real readers to help you grow a piece of writing
• Consider your purpose

Telling Stories

As we go about our lives, we need to open our ears and take note when a story comes our way. To train ourselves to notice stories, it’s helpful to practice using some common story sources. Sometimes, when we explore these sources, we find stories we like that we can simply retell. We can also gather material from story sources and put it together in different ways to create new stories. In both cases, we get practice in the activity of telling a story.

Voice

One’s writing voice is not necessarily the same as one’s speaking voice; whether we are writing a novel or a magazine article, it is unlikely that the voice we use will sound exactly like the way we speak. Nonetheless, there is something that is uniquely “us” in those words on the page.