The purpose of the pilot study, which is a part of a larger project on ESL writing involving freshmen college students in the Philippines, is to explore the relationship between writer's performance, writer's resources, and writer's idea generation process. To measure the writer's performance, diagnostic essays of 85 Filipino freshmen engineering students were evaluated based on Gustilo's (2011) modified holistic scoring guide. To measure writer's resources, tests on linguistic knowledge and topic familiarity and a survey questionnaire on writing background were administered to the same students. To measure writer's idea generation process while composing, a Likert Scale questionnaire based on Chenoweth and Hayes 2001 and 2003 models was designed and administered to the students after their diagnostic essay task. Pearson product moment correlation was used to test for significant relationships. Discourse completion task (DCT) was administered to confirm the results gathered through quantitative method. Findings partly confirm the findings of previous studies. Writer's performance is correlated with all the variables under study except for spelling test.