Since I switched from writing these Sunday Stories every week to once a month, I’ve noticed it’s much harder to write them.

I loved writing the stories every week. It took me a half-hour to do so. I thought about what I would write throughout the week, so I always looked for items of interest I might put to paper. It heightened my creativity and made me look more closely at my world.

Even if I wasn’t drafting a story, I was always thinking about what I might write, which is part of the writing process called prewriting.

Most people think writing is a singular act, but it’s not. Writing is actually a four-step process: prewriting, drafting, editing/revising, and proofreading.

Drafting is what we usually consider writing, but the step before drafting a story is sometimes even more important than filling a page with words.

Prewriting includes many processes, including thinking, composing in your head, brainstorming, reading, writing rituals, researching, walking, outlining, and so forth.

It’s anything you do that prepares you to write.

To write these Sunday Stories, I enjoyed romping around in prewriting all week long before I began drafting the story. I took photos, jotted down notes, looked up info, wrote and rewrote versions in my head, and had a good old time doing it.

That prewriting process enabled me to draft my Sunday Stories each week in a half-hour. Then came the editing and proofreading. The real work followed when I spent several hours creating the posts on my website, finding photos to go with them, putting together the email to send out, and such.

I say that not to tell you I will resume writing every week but as an observation about the process. If you do it consistently, writing is much easier than if you start and stop. Those periods of not writing grow longer in time, and returning to your writing desk takes much longer. Bottomline: write regularly.