Today I told my students the truth about writing and thinking:
When you write, you think. Neurons in your brain start firing in a familiar pattern until there’s no more neural connections in that area. That’s when some students stop writing–when they run out of ideas. They believe they can only write about what they think about first.
This is exactly when you must keep writing.
When you keep writing in the face of a dead-end neural pathway, you have no choice but to write about something else. You go to another section of neural connections, then transcribe that though process on the page. Then another, and another. You keep writing about what you do know about, what you can uncover within your own mind, or about some questions you have about that which you don’t know.
Every now and then, that process of writing, then writing more, allows you to draw connections neural connections between the ideas you wrote down, pathways you didn’t previously have. And you have just learned something new, without turning to an outside source. It was within your own mind. A self-revelation, a connection, a link that might shift your perception from here on out.
So write, and keep writing. Do not think first, just write. Let your thoughts flow then let them snag, trip, scrape their knees, and flow again. In this way writing is an act of courage–it’s going where your mind hasn’t gone before, into the unknown. Into yourself.