Five Steps to a Better Writing Process

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1. Give Yourself Time
The time of writing is different from the time of daily life. In daily life, our time is not free: we have to work, to meet obligations, to deal with the demands of the moment and with situations that call on us to act. We focus on the ephemeral and lose sight of what really matters.

To regain perspective, we have to give ourselves time to write—to step away from daily life, to come back to ourselves, to reconnect with our deeper concerns, to gather thoughts, to try to see things for what they are, and to put what we see into words. Writing every day is both a discipline and a form of devotion: it is the long, slow work of moving toward true understanding, and also a gift of time devoted to what we love.

Think of Marcus Aurelius. He gave himself time to write, even when he was Emperor of Rome, because writing for him was a way to strengthen his soul. In the words of Pierre Hadot, “As he wrote the Meditations, Marcus was thus practicing Stoic spiritual exercises…. This was an exercise of writing day by day, ever-renewed, always taken up again and always needing to be taken up again, since the true philosopher is he who is conscious of not yet having attained wisdom.” If Marcus could find time to write, then so can you.

Writing takes time. To do it well takes more time than you think. Don’t tell yourself you will get around to writing at some point in the future. The time to write is now.

2. Read and Write at the Same Time
Don’t separate reading and writing. Seneca made this point in a letter to a friend: “We ought neither to write exclusively nor read exclusively: the first—writing, that is—will deaden and exhaust our powers; the second will weaken and dilute them. One must do both by turns, tempering one with the other, so that whatever is collected through reading may be assimilated into the body by writing.” It is a mistake to think that first we do the work of reading, and afterwards do the work of writing.

To read a text well, it helps to start writing about it: highlight key sentences, use post-it notes to tag significant passages, make comments in the margins, write out notes on crucial parts of the text, and jot down ideas you want to include in your writing. If you deeply admire a text, copy its key passages word for word. Just copying a text will help you learn its style.

To write well about a text, it helps to go back and re-read it; nothing makes us read a text more carefully than having to write about it.

3. Write Multiple Drafts
Good writing takes rewriting. Nothing great was written in one draft. Tolstoy wrote six full drafts of Anna Karenina. Elie Wiesel’s first draft of Night was 862 pages, which he eventually cut down to 116. On each draft, do the best you can in the time you have. Then rewrite ruthlessly: rethink the outline, reorganize the paragraphs, cut the clutter, polish the language.

Writing takes time. To do it well takes more time than you think. Don’t tell yourself you will get around to writing at some point in the future. The time to write is now.

A rule of thumb: Whenever you get back to work on a writing project, go over what you have already written and make it more lucid and fluent. That will improve the writing you have already done and get you ready for what you still have to do. Hemingway did this when he wrote A Farewell to Arms: “I was happier than I had ever been. Each day I read the book through to the point where I went on writing and each day I stopped when I was still going good and when I knew what would happen next.” Rereading and revising your work will get you back into the work of writing.

4. Get Feedback on Each Draft
It is hard to read our own writing. When we look at what we have written, we tend to see what we meant to say rather than what we actually said. Our words seem clear because we see them from our own perspective and in light of our own understanding. This is the point of feedback—we need others to tell us what we have written.

Since other people come at our writing from different angles, they can see what is hidden from our point of view. But since they have their own point of view, their vision of our writing is bound to be limited as well: they will see some of it clearly, some in a distorted way, and some aspects not at all. Even the most obtuse and unjust criticism can be inadvertently illuminating and helpful, if it shows how our writing is open to being misread. The hardest task of writing is to look for grains of truth in criticism that seems stupid and unfair. Listen to feedback carefully: pick out the grains of truth, correct the distortions, and ignore the blind spots.

5. Write Until You Can Say the Same Thing in Brief and at Length
You have not fully worked out a path of thought until you can lay it out at different levels of generality: a one-sentence summary, a single paragraph, a few pages, a synopsis of each section, the complete text, and unwritten elaborations on every part of the text. The final aim is to think through the project at many levels of generality and specificity, so that you can see the whole work at different altitudes, zooming in and out from the granular detail visible at ground level to the comprehensive overview available at thirty thousand feet.

The final aim of an academic project, for example, is not just a complete text but a book proposal that includes chapter summaries, a one hundred-word abstract, and a one-sentence distillation of the whole project. The final aim of a screenwriter is not just a complete typescript but may also include a one-minute pitch, a ten-minute pitch, storyboards, reels, and a synopsis of the arc of the story (opening, inciting incident, first act break, midpoint reversal, second act break, and climax). Writing a life story tends to be overwhelming unless we work on telling the story both in brief and at length: a few sentences, a few pages, a few dozen pages, and a few hundred pages.

To think through a text in this way, it helps to write and rewrite different levels of the same project at the same time. Be ready to revise your general view of the whole as you write out specific parts; but also be willing to edit and cut specific parts as your general overview of the project evolves.

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Excerpted from Philosophy of Writing by David Arndt, available via Bloomsbury Academic. Copyright © 2026. All rights reserved.