To affect is “to have an effect on, make a difference to.”
This stage—step 3 of making your story happen—is where you’ll just start creating.
This is the drafting stage.
Write, write, write, write, write, write, write, write… and then write some more.
Put your ideas into sentences and paragraphs.
Explain and support your ideas. You already brainstormed and know how they connect to your focus, so you’ll expound on them fully here.
This is also where you make all the connections you thought could exist, and put down even more. Regardless of how much thinking and planning you did, the process of putting your ideas into words changes them or makes them grow.
My book ‘Words of Hope’ was a spinoff of a research paper I wrote while I was getting my Masters. The paper was a real academic snoozefest about the resistance of governments, countries, and people to the language Esperanto. However, I was really moved by the creator’s reasons, and decided to write a book about it from that angle.
This stage tends to be writer-centered.
it’s just you talking to yourself through your work. This is where you tell yourself what you know and think about your topic. Sometimes, I open the Notepad or Google Docs, enable Voice-to-Text, then start elucidating.
This is the stage where you get all your excitement and enthusiasm about the project onto paper. You’ll want all your thoughts and as much material as possible—you never know what you’ll need or want later on down the line. And, kind of like a gun in a dangerous neighborhood, it’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
And!
Don’t worry about spelling or formatting at this stage. There’s plenty of time for that in the next steps.