• exploring – just getting stuff down. No plans necessarily, just start scribbling in different places. Perhaps this also extends from notes you took on reading you have done. No pressure, just see where your mind takes you (e.g., you could try “freewriting” where you don’t stop typing even when you have nothing meaningful to write).
• planning – getting organized. It seems some writers swear by outlines, flow charts, concept maps, lists.
• drafting – Putting stuff down. That first draft is always kinda “meh”–that’s okay! You need to start somewhere. In the act of writing you get further than where you were–like good science, you really don’t know what is going to happen until you run the experiment. So, run the experiment! And do it early if possible…that waiting until the last minute thing can only get you so far.
• revising – This is what Murray was talking about. Revising is looking over a draft to cut stuff out, rewrite stuff, move stuff around. You ran your experiment and the results leave more questions than answers. Time to tweak things and run it again.
• editing – Not everyone makes a clean distinction between revising and editing, but I think it can be useful. Editing is the easy stuff. It is often what I do when I should be revising. It is cleaning up a sentence to be more readable, it is fixing typos, it is changing a word that you think works better, etc. It is the small stuff.
• feedback – learning how to interpret feedback (in both emotional terms–who likes to be criticized!–and in terms of what it means) and how to integrate it into your writing is a real skill and something valuable for revising and editing our writing.
• reflection – to reflect is to sort of plan after you re-read or think again about how your writing went. It is to ask questions of how you think you did, where you want to go next, and how to get there. This might be in relation to goals you have in your writing in general or specific to the piece you wrote. It is helpful to make time for reflection so you can name what you specifically want to do in next steps.

None of these steps have clear boundaries–you might be exploring while revising or planning while drafting, and so on. And there is no one right way to do any of them (e.g., outlines to plan work for some people and not for others, some people rather explore through generative writing before planning, some might include other steps like reading/annotating).

Most writers also do these steps in different orders and–most important–in a recursive way. That is, you might: explore, plan, draft, revise, reflect, draft again, revise again, get feedback, reflect, revise again, edit, reflect, draft again, revise again, edit…and then publish.

All this to say: there are not hard and solid rules here!! Only that you should think carefully about what your process is and works best for you to feel best about your writing.