Pebblepup's Writing Den

The first step in creating a prioritized list is to make the list. Whenever you have a project that you’ve broken into steps. You need to rank those steps. What do you need to do first? What can wait until later? This is a prioritized list. For example. In writing a novel, you need to do some basic research and make some decisions. You need to create characters settings. And you need to develop your plot. The way I do it is I create a story treatment, so that’s the first step. I give that top priority. You can use deadlines or not as you wish. And at this stage in a novel writing process, I do not set deadlines.

When you write a story treatment, you have to do certain things. List them out. Write up a premise. Make a list of characters. Do some world building. Explore the acts. Then you assign these steps priorities. So We’ve made a list. And now we need to apply ranks to it. the way I do it is, I give top priority to writing the premise. I give second priority to the characters.

A story needs a place to happen, so I give third priority to world building. Then I determine what needs to happen in act one. What needs to happen in ACT 2, and so on. That’s the 4th priority. If you’re a pantser, this is where you would stop and go to writing. If you’re a plotter, you go on to list out the rest of the things you need to do before you write your story.

This is one example of a prioritized list. It’s how I do it. You may come up with a different process. You determine the priorities by what you need to do and in what order. This is a useful thing to do no matter what your project is Writing a novel. Planting your garden. Whatever you plan to do, this is how you go about it. Assigning priorities to steps. It makes the tasks much easier to do.

Some steps are obvious in which needs to go first. For example, you wouldn’t teach calculus to someone who doesn’t know basic. Arithmetic. Sometimes assigning a priority is that easy. Taking the math. Example further you teach someone arithmetic. Then algebra and geometry. Then you could tackle calculus. Start with the basics and move on to complexity.

Writing a prioritized list is not that difficult to do. It involves a little more effort than the simple act of writing a list. Take that list you’ve written and decide what steps you need to do before another step. If you get 2 steps where it doesn’t matter if it happens first or second. Flip a coin. Decide, assign the priority and move on. The result will be a nice, prioritized. A list that will guide you through your project, whatever the project is. That’s all there is to it. Good luck and keep writing.