Writing guru Roy Peter Clark has come up with a great word for the mental work done before putting fingers to keyboard: prevision. It’s the first of three stages in the writing process: prevision, vision, revision. Prevision is “[w]hat to call that period of mental and physical rehearsal that precedes coming to a full understanding of what your story is really about—before you truly ‘see’ the story.”
Me, I spend a majority of my briefwriting time in the prevision stage: digesting the record, researching the law, looking for what pop-song writers call the hook. Why? Because before you hit the road, you’d better figure out where you’re going.
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