Climbing Mount Kearsarge, New Hampshire, 2006.

Relax

• Give yourself plenty of time to make this journey.
• Put yourself in the mood before you go.

Fish

• Generate ideas: free write, keep lists, write from prompts.

Swim

• Dive in deep with your material, hold it in your mind, daydream about it, meditate on it; jot down notes, ideas, sentences.

Train

• Practice writing: keep a journal, write letters, do writing exercises.

Plan the climb

• Figure out what you need to take on this journey. Gather all of your ideas, notes, and references.
• Think about how to “pack” your material in a way that makes sense; jot down your ideas about how you might arrange things. You could begin to organize your material logically, with your main idea up front, where readers can easily access it, or you might want to organize your material intuitively, beginning with the most startling image or the most dramatic scene.

Assess the mountain

• Write out your hopes and fears about the journey.
• Is anything standing in your way?
• Do you need more information?

Visualize the climb

• Envision yourself writing with ease; envision yourself finishing the journey in good time, with good spirits and good weather.
• Free write a pre-draft. Tell everything you can about your topic, everything you think and feel and imagine about it, everything you’ve discovered.

Climb the mountain

View from the top of Mount Kearsarge, New Hampshire, 2006.

• Revise your pre-draft.
• Put your ideas or scenes into an order that makes sense, give them plenty of space to expand, until you are saying fully and clearly what you mean.
• Write an opening that grabs attention and a closing that sums up or makes a final, emphatic point.

Review the journey

• Have you conveyed everything you wanted to?
• Are you happy with the way you’ve organized this journey?
• Did you pack excess baggage that you can let go of now?
• Is there anything important you left out?
• Is your piece as clear, accurate, and powerful as you’d like it to be?

Climb the mountain again and again

• Revise your first draft.
• Cut out any material that doesn’t move your narrative forward.
• Check spelling, syntax, and punctuation to put your piece in final form. Use this experience to plan your next writing climb.

Enjoy the journey! As aviator and alpinist Margaret Young has said, “Climbing is as close as we can come to flying.”

View of Mount Kearsarge from a trail that poet Jane Kenyon once hiked.

“Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be—an author, primarily of fiction, making good books, making good comics and supporting myself through my words—was a mountain. A distant mountain. My goal. And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain I would be all right.”

This quote comes from Gaiman’s commencement address to University of the Arts, May 17, 2012. See the video and read the transcript here.

Read what Georgia O’Keeffe said about her favorite mountain.

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