ABSTRACT
Psycholinguistic accounts of language production typically have taken as their remit the description of how people translate intention into language (Levelt, 1989). They tend to start, therefore, with the assumption that would-be language producers have something to communicate and then proceed to explain how their ideas are turned into language. Real life typically is not like that. Frequently, the need to produce language precedes having anything very specific to communicate. This is most obviously true of the contexts in which language production takes the form of writing. Professional fiction writing, undergraduate essay writing, e-mail writing to friends, and even the writing of this chapter are to a large degree motivated initially by the need to produce something in writing. What that something is not a given, provided before writing has started. Discovering what to say is part and parcel of the writing process.
