The story of COMPOSE

The ideal writing process transcends genre. That’s among the most useful concepts we’ve seen at Writing.coach: what it takes to write an outstanding poem, speech, screenplay, essay, book, manifesto, declaration, or constitution is mostly the same as what it takes to write an outstanding Tweet, email, or startup pitch. Writing wears many costumes, but the action—the writing process—stays the same.

If a process generally stays the same, it can be mapped out. If you have the map, you can learn the process, repeat it, and get better at it steadily over time.

So, we began to map out the writing process. Our objective was to make it easy to recall the foundations of writing, even in the thick of it.

We came up with COMPOSE:

Concept
Objective
Material
Plan
Organization 
Style
Elegance

COMPOSE describes the writing process from start to finish. The best writing checks all 7 boxes.

It took us 7 months to get those 7 words right, on top of decades of past experience. At that point, we had a Plan.

It was time to take all the Material we’d saved up and Organize it into a readable format. Since our Objective was to make it easy to recall the foundations of writing, we decided to convey the essential points in about 5 pages. Prioritizing brevity, we shelved ~40 pages of loose material during this organization phase.

Eventually, we were ready for Style—a secret pleasure akin to debugging. Like tiptoeing children, we stole minutes throughout the day to play with words and phrases, while our footsteps were tracked in hundreds of timestamps in our Version History. All along the way, we were on the same page about what had to happen next—because although our paths had been different, we had landed on the same understanding of the writing process.

Elegance, the seemingly decorative endcap of our acronym, is the most important principle. It’s the bullseye. Without aiming for elegance, you can’t produce excellent writing. As soon as it occurred to us to make elegance the ultimate box to check, we knew it was a high bar worth reaching.

When we felt we had maximized elegance within our project’s parameters, we published the first COMPOSE article.