In Bird by Bird, the novelist Anne Lamott elegantly captures this rhythm of creation. “You find yourself back at the desk, staring blankly at the pages you filled yesterday. And there on page four is a paragraph with all sorts of life in it, smells and sounds and voices and colors,” she writes. “You don’t care about those first three pages; those y

ASSIGNMENT: As a writer, it’s important for you to know yourself and understand what works best for you. So I urge you to spend some time pondering, and writing on this question: are you a plotter or pantser? What are your process quirks?

The first thing I do is read over my freewriting and see if there’s anything I want to save. I’m looking for ideas, observations, stories, and hypotheses. For want of a better phrase, I call each one of these a thought chunk. When I find a promising chunk, I cut it out of the freewriting document and drop it into a separate document that holds simi