While we talk a lot about what to write — More stories! Fewer words! Shorter sentences! — we don’t focus so much on how.

Most of us were never taught to write. We were taught instead to rewrite: how to spell, punctuate and use the right grammar. As a result, we try to do three things at once: Figure out what to write, write it and get it right. No wonder writing is so hard!

But if you’ll break your work up into three stages of the writing process and write step by step, you’ll write better, easier and faster. This process has saved me thousands of hours of writing time over the course of my career.

Are you ready to write better, easier and faster? Here are the three writing process steps:

I. Pre writing

Pre writing is where you get ready to write, or develop a plan for your story. This step includes everything you do to prepare to put the first word onto the page:

A. Research. You’ve heard the phrase “hog in, sausage out.” That means that what you get out of the grinder will be no better than what you put in it.

That’s certainly true in writing. No matter how accomplished a writer you are, your story will be no better than your material. To research your message, conduct:

1. Background research. Think of this as homework. This is all the research you do to get ready for the interview — from reviewing your subject-matter expert’s deck to asking Google to define cochlear implant. That will help you:
   • Save time gathering information. Why reinvent the wheel?
   • Prepare for the interview. (No more embarrassing questions!)
   • Dig up juicy details that bring your story to life.
2. Interview. When you nail down the basic facts in your background research, you can use the interview to add humanity and detail to the story. Instead of covering the five 5 W’s, you’ll spend your precious interview minutes getting anecdotes, analogies and compelling quotes. Think Terry Gross, not your high school journalism teacher.
3. Observational research. You’ve heard of MBWA, or management by walking around? This is WBHA, or writing by hanging around — going to the scene to observe. Take a tour, watch a demo or see your subject in action. There’s nothing like being there to add compelling detail to your story.

B. Story angle. Like a tree, your message can branch out in different directions. But it should all come back to a single trunk. That trunk is your story angle.

Here’s a quick trick I use to come up with my story angle: Write your walkaway sentence — that’s the one sentence you want your readers to walk away with — in a single sentence, on the back of your business card. Use that sentence as your headline or deck, nut graph and wrap-up paragraph.

Then tape that business card to your monitor while you work. If a single paragraph, sentence or word doesn’t work to further that walkaway sentence, take it out.

C. Structure. Spend a few minutes organizing your message upfront, and you’ll save hours agonizing over it later

Put your effort up top. Most writers invest little time in the pre-writing process, focusing instead on fixing a lame draft during the rewriting phase.

Turn that investment upside down: Spend the bulk of your time getting ready to write, and you’ll spend less time fixing what you wrote. As a result, you’ll write better, easier and faster.

II. Free writing

There comes a point in any writing project where you have to follow Ernest Hemingway’s first rule for writers, and apply the seat of your pants to the seat of a chair. You have to write.

And that’s second stage of the writing process: free writing, or getting your rough draft on paper or the screen. It’s much easier to revise your work when you have a piece of writing to revise.

To free write your message:

• Get your nose out of your notebook. Typing up your notes isn’t writing; it’s typing. Moving your notes around in a Word document isn’t writing, either. The only way to write is to write. You know this stuff! Get your nose out of your notebook and write.
• Banish the grammar police. Use a dash instead of a semicolon? Write “you’re” when you mean “your”? Even misspell the CEO’s name? Don’t worry about it! You can always go back and fix your mistakes later. What you can’t do is go back and breathe life into a rough draft that never really got written in the first place.
• Write quickly, without stopping. In free writing, you want to achieve what creativity experts call “flow.” In that state, you’ll feel as if you can hardly type fast enough to keep up with your ideas — as if the words are flowing from your fingers. The only way to achieve that is to let momentum carry you along. So keep writing.
• Take a break and percolate. Stuck? Don’t just sit there. Do something! Get up. Move around. Get some fresh air. In a minute or two, you’ll find yourself back at your desk, eager to capture your next idea.

III. Rewriting

Here’s where you fine-tune your message: revising and editing and nailing grammar, spelling and punctuation.

This is what we used to call writing!

Spend enough time pre writing and free writing, and rewriting should be a breeze. Instead of heavy lifting — cutting and pasting and moving and fixing — rewriting becomes tweaking and polishing.

Why 3 stages of the writing process?

Writers who divide their writing into these steps are:

• Less likely to suffer from writer’s block
• More likely to meet their deadlines
• Unlikely to get stressed out in the process

Want to write better, easier and faster? Why not try pre writing, free writing and rewriting today?

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Source: Richard Andersen, Writing That Works, McGraw-Hill, 1989

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Humor is one of the Top 3 reasons people share information, according to a study by Chadwick Martin Bailey:

• Because I find it interesting/entertaining (72%)
• To get a laugh (58%)
• Because I think it will be helpful to recipients (58%)

So how can content writers and others add humor to your content marketing, blog posts and other communication campaigns? You don’t need a class in comedy writing to write funnier. You don’t even need to be a funny person, though a sense of humor may help you find funny material.

Here are three ways to get your target audience to click, read, like and share your message by adding humor to your content:

1. Try self-deprecating humor.

When executives at the San Francisco sewer department needed to call attention to the system’s crumbling infrastructure, PR pros at Davis & Associates knew just what was needed.

Poop jokes.

Traditionally, outreach for public agencies has been formulaic, sober and dull. But blah-blahing about upgrading failing infrastructure to ensure the reliability and performance now and into the future wasn’t going to cut it.

So D&A PR professionals stole a line from critics of the deteriorating sewer system, who sized up the situation, tongue in cheek, as “a bunch of crap.”

D&A pros pushed their client to “walk the fine line between attention getting and off-putting” (PDF, PRSA members only).

They plastered “No one deals with more crap than I do” and “You can’t live a day without me” ads on buses and Facebook feeds. They offered fun facts on their campaign website, hosted a quiz with prizes and even wrote a rap song. Because of course they did.

The results? Coverage by Inc. and Fast Company. In-depth stories on the local news. A double-digit increase in social media engagement.

And — oh, yes — a PRSA Silver Anvil for Davis & Associates PR pros.

Which means, of course, that they are hot, um, stuff.

Are you taking yourself, your organization and your offerings too seriously?

2. Tell a joke.

When I first joined the National Speakers Association, jokes had a terrible name:

Jokes are old-fashioned, simple and lame.

They sound like they came from a joke book.

You run the risk that your audience has heard them before, making you appear to be stealing old humor.

Only original observational humor, in the form of personal stories, will do.

But seriously, folks, jokes — even old jokes — can help you make a point.

So how can you use jokes without looking lame?

Hook and hinge, suggests Sam Horn, author of POP! Stand Out In Any Crowd. “The joke hooks people’s interest, and then you hinge the punch line onto how it’s relevant to your point,” she writes.

Here’s how it works, in a speech by former Sprint CEO William T. Esrey at a telecom conference:

1. Expected direction:

2. Unexpected turn/hook:

3. Hinge to the point:

4. State your point:

Because you’re using the joke to make a point and not just to entertain, readers and other audience members will forgive you for being more amusing than hilarious.

And if the joke has been around for awhile? Introduce it as an old joke. Then your readers will know you know. And you’ll all be in on the joke.

3. Twist a list.

A New Yorker cartoon shows pirates making three sailors walk the plank. “You’re right,” one of the pirates says. “Things are funnier in threes.”

Stuck for humor? Try a series of three or more items. Series allow you to surprise and amuse your reader by breaking the pattern.

1. Twist a list. One way to use a series for humor is to twist a list. That is:

• Set your list up with two or more serious items.
• Break the pattern with a funny final item — aka your punchline.

Stephen Colbert used this approach on a recent episode of “The Colbert Report” when he compared:

What funny thing could you add to a list of serious items to twist a list in your next piece?

2. Make a list. In “Three Things,” his copyediting e-zine for Entergy employees, Chris Smith always starts with a triad quote. One of my favorites:

“Irish coffee contains the three major food groups: alcohol, caffeine and sugar.”

— Michael Eck, on The Book of Threes website

Then Smith takes off from that triad to build a list of three tips:

3. Count off a list. In a restaurant, I once overheard a diner say:

“The six most beautiful words in the English language: ‘I’ll have the rack of lamb.’”

Yesterday I tweeted:

The five words you never want to hear your new yoga teacher say: ‘Plank is my favorite pose.”

What are the nicest (or worst) words in your organization?

Tax season is over?

Budgets are due Monday?

Use “the X most X words in the English language” setup to add a little humor to your next piece.

4. Extend a list. You can also find humor in a series by extending someone else’s list. In Eat the Rich, P.J. O’Rourke extended a quote by Winston Churchill:

“Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, tied in a hankie, rolled in a blanket and packed in a box full of little Styrofoam peanuts,” said Winston Churchill, or something like that.

Got a series? Just keep adding items … in escalating order of ridiculousness.

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“The hard part” of writing, says playwright Tom Stoppard, “is getting to the top of page one.”

Getting to the top of page one is the job of prewriting, the first step of the writing process. That’s where you develop a plan for your story.

Prewriting includes everything you do to get ready to write. During prewriting, you’ll:

• Research your story. You’ve heard the phrase “hog in, sausage out.” No matter how accomplished a writer you are, your story will be no better than your material.
• Develop your story angle. Come up with the key message that will drive every paragraph, sentence, phrase and word of your message.
• Organize your piece. Spend a few minutes organizing your message upfront, and you’ll save hours agonizing over it later.

What’s not prewriting: revising and editing. That’s the last step of the writing process, called rewriting.

Prewriting will help you:

1. Craft your story.

Typing isn’t writing; thinking is writing. Prewriting is where you figure out what you’re going to say. The rest is just getting words onto the page.

“My working habits are simple,” wrote Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize-winning novelist: “long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.”

2. Write to length.

Why write a thesis when what you need is a tweet? Prewriting can help you write to length. That saves you the time you would have spent overwriting — plus the time you would have spent going back through to edit out the extra words.

“Keep it short from the initial conception,” writes Poynter Institute senior scholar Roy Peter Clark. “You can write a haiku faster than a sonnet, a sonnet faster than an epic.”

3. Get ready to write.

Prewriting helps you stuff your brain with information and ideas so the back of your mind can work on your story while you’re doing the dishes. Best-case scenario: You’ll write the story in your head, so it flows from your fingers when you hit the keyboard.

“Writing is no trouble,” wrote Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock. “You just jot down the ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself … it is the occurring which is difficult.”

Now, on to step 2 …

Prewriting gives you a road map for the next step of the process: That’s when you free write, or get words onto the page.

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Source: Richard Andersen, Writing That Works, McGraw-Hill, 1989

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