As I work with people at different stages of the writing process, I find that they're often surprised that there IS a writing process. Most often, we imagine how a "real" writer works. He sits down at his lovely, mahogany desk and gets out his pad of paper or his antiquated typewriter. He flexes his fingers, and grabs his favorite fountain pen or starts typing on the keys. Suddenly, words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters fly onto the paper. After some pre-determined time, Real Writer puts down his pen or takes his fingers off the keys, stretches, sighs a sigh of satisfaction, and gets up from the desk. He brushes his hands together - another successful day of writing done and pages of manuscript in the hopper.
Unh-unh.
That's how we imagine it works, but it doesn't. Writing is a process with at least three distinct parts.