#50: Writing is formalized thinking
Lessons from my first year of writing
When I'm about to write, I tend to think I have a clear understanding of the idea or story I want to convey, and when I sit down to write it out, it's going to be clear on the page immediately because I feel like I have such a fundamental understanding of it.
Then I sit down, and that is not what happens at all. As I begin to write, the words on the page do not articulate what I'm thinking at all.
The idea is incomplete.
There are significant gaps in my thoughts.
The paragraphs, sentences, and words lack meaning and are completely out of order.
And I don't know how to fix it. I sit there struggling, and it hurts to see how poorly the words on the page reflect the idea I am striving to convey.
Through this writing process, I can literally see, on the page, how bad my communication is on this particular idea or subject. Even as I wrote down this lesson, I experienced this same process.
And there's a term for this, your first stab at writing something. It's called a rough draft. And if you're anything like me, version 0 of your rough draft is always terrible. It's just incoherent words vomited on the page.
And what I learned is that this is the process of thinking. When you're thinking, you're not sure where you're going. You're trying to move your understanding forward, trying to get from point A to point B, but you're not exactly sure what or where point B is. And you certainly don't know the straightest path to get there.
So, that process of
vomiting everything onto the page,
trying to understand where these thoughts are taking you
and nailing down that destination
and trying to delete all the unnecessary fluff and just go straight from A to B
is the process of thinking.
The catch is that I, and most people, often think by talking. And when we think by talking, we are speaking out loud our roughest of drafts onto the world. We're dragging people through that windy path because we don't even know where we're headed. And we tend not to notice it because, unlike when it's written, we can't literally see how poor our articulation is like we can when it is written down. I call this process of thinking by talking Rough Draft Speaking.
So, I try to do a whole lot less Rough Draft Speaking now. It's much better to vomit those words onto a page first instead of onto someone else.
One last thing I'll mention here, since it was a bit of a revelation for me, is that when articulate people take long pauses before answering a question, the process they are going through in their heads is exactly this process of thinking. They're trying to identify point B and think of a way to articulate the straightest line between A and B before they open their mouth. I'm trying to do more of that.