Write First, Think Second
Think of something you’d like to write about. Don’t read on until you’ve thought of something.
Now write down your thought in a full sentence—as an argument, as the main message you’d like to say.
Now ask yourself, what has changed in moving my thoughts from my head to the page? How has the idea evolved into a clearer, more precise statement, or how has it taken a new track completely or even devolved into a worse idea?
You’ll notice how much happened when your sentence took shape. When I did this now, my first thought was an article about “coffee.” But writing this thought here belies its complexity. When it arose in my mind, it wasn’t just a word but a network of rich associations I latch on to this word: the pleasure of drinking it; the aromas and gurgles of the espresso pot; the dynamics of the global coffee trade; the molecular makeup of coffee that wins it so many daily devotees. In this cacophony arose the question, why is it that the Danes top the list of coffee drinkers worldwide?—a random stat I recently picked up.
This web of ideas is a paradox. It is infinitely complex yet vague at the same time. Our thoughts bounce involuntarily among fragmented notions—some well developed and others nascent. To say that we “write down the idea” is false. When we write, we force ourselves to make choices, to condense something solid out of this nebula. I’d venture to say that only when we write something down does it become a true idea.
To describe what’s happening here, we might borrow Daniel Kahneman’s term, the “illusion of understanding”: we exaggerate how well we understand the past and are thus overconfident in predicting the future. As writers, we consistently overestimate our grasp of ideas while they are locked up in our head. Even with the sentence before us, we elude ourselves by thinking that we have simply transcribed the idea from brain to page.
Now look again at what you wrote down. It should no longer be a general topic but an actual claim. My sentence was, “Despite its benefits in eliminating free radicals, coffee may harm our health in the long term by making our bodies overly acidic.” Now I have something to work with—something to elaborate upon and justify, or even something to convince myself out of.
The point is that as a writer, you always need something to push against. Most good writers don’t dawdle much before putting something on the page. Write first, think second. As novelist E.O. Forster put it, “How do I know what I think until I’ve seen what I’ve said?”
