Mining and Refining: The Two Modes of Writing

There are two modes of writing: mining and refining. You’re either digging for coal, or pressing it into diamonds.

When you mine, you search for raw material. That might look like brainstorming, it might look like research, it might look like eavesdropping. It might look like nothing. You’re watching a movie and it sparks a notion, you write it down.

That last example is a little different from the others. It feels passive. You weren’t looking for the idea; it came to you. But you had to notice the idea, and you had to write it down, and that requires diligence. So mining is never passive. Just sometimes it runs in the background.

When you refine, you take your raw material and shape it into a story, an essay, an article, etc. In film editing, you collect hours of footage, then stitch them together in the cutting room. The writing process is the same. You collect reams of notes, ideas, and disparate scenes, then piece them together in the word processor.

Refining might look like reordering chapters or scenes, it might look like reordering beats or rewriting a sentence. The process is the same at every level.

As you write, you switch between modes. You mine some ideas, start in on refining them. As you do that, your brain’s still mining, so more ideas come to you, and you catch them as they fall. That’s spontaneity, and writing is spontaneity codified.