…Is Writing
You have a stack of books in front of you, non-fiction, maybe, for a heap of research you intend to do for your novel. Your computer is flush with open tabs on a plethora of websites, also for research. You may be writing a historical novel, or not. You may be writing contemporary fiction or not. Regardless of genre, most writers do some work before they prepare their outlines.
For my adult fantasy novel The Fairy Tale Fringe Festival, I studied up on fairy tales, folklore, myths and legends. I read scores of them as well as academic studies on scores of them. I immersed myself in their importance in our culture because that’s what I wanted to reflect in my characters.
And every minute of every research page I’d read, I had to remind myself I was writing. I wasn’t getting words on a page—hell, I wasn’t anywhere close figuring out a protagonist, let alone what their story would be about. But shouldn’t I be there, curser blinking on page 1? Isn’t that writing?
Nope. Writing isn’t about words on a page. Writing is about words with meaning on a page. How could I infuse meaning into what I wrote if I had no idea what, exactly, I wanted to say?
Some people call this stage “prewriting” but I reject that label. Writing is a process, one that includes research and brainstorming and taking notes and playing around with ideas.
Which means, at this first stage, you are writing.