Write, then Think

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.

Writing and Thinking

You may think writing comes out of thinking. You think a thought, then you write it down. This is how all great works novels, articles, books, plays, poems, and songs arise.

But you’d be wrong. Writing isn’t a byproduct of thinking, but thinking happens because you write. I can’t number the times I’ve had no clue what to write an essay on, then five hours later the essay is finished and submitted. It was only written because I was writing.

Now think about what you wrote for your high school biology class. Lab reports. Boring, monotonous, regurgitated lab reports that were identical to each of your classmates. The lab report is important, but it’s not the only way to write about science.

What if science students watched a video about a hawk snatching another bird and eating it, then they journalled about it? What if they wrote stories about who the hawk was and why she was hungry? Imagine the questions that would come from writing creatively about the natural world.

If we want to solve modern problems to create a hopeful future, we have to think outside the box. To think outside the box, we have to write outside the box. If we want to write outside the box, we better have a good pen.