Several years ago, on of the blogs I read regularly, I found this clip (which I’d seen before but still find amusing):

Do any of these processes look familiar??

On a more serious note, in his essay “A Way of Writing” the poet and teacher William Stafford writes:

“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.”

Ernest Hemingway claimed, “My working habits are simple: long periods of thinking, short periods of writing.”

Composition books often divide the writing process into the stages of

• prewriting (gathering up ideas by thinking, jotting notes, clustering, and so forth)
• drafting (from when a writer sits down to start putting down sentences and paragraphs)
• revising (literally “seeing the piece again” to consider focus, development, organization, style)
• proofreading (in which writer checks for “correctness: of usage, grammar, spelling)