Thinking about Writing

I came across this brilliant quote from Leslie Lamport: “If you think without writing, you only think you’re thinking.” It’s simple yet so meaningful.

Writing reinforces my thoughts. It won’t be a stretch to say that I understand my thoughts only through #writing. Distil them. Before that, they are just fuzzy noises in my head.

While in school, my teachers would force me to write down what I learned to help me remember it better. We students were made to write chapters multiple times to learn them. But at that time, learning meant remembering things, not grasping them. I wish someone had told us that writing helped us understand things better. I would have fallen in love with writing a lot earlier.

There’s another analogy to Lamport’s earlier quote: “If you’re thinking about writing, you only think you’re writing.”

Though I haven’t written much for the past few days, I thought a lot about writing. Every day, I had a new idea to write about. Every day, I gave myself multiple reasons why I shouldn’t write about it. Many ended up in drafts. Many had a painful death in my head. It’s a terrible place to die for an idea. So I must let them out more often, in whatever ugly shape or form.

I often have phases when, for every inspiration on why I should write, my mind comes up with a hundred distractions about why I shouldn’t. The only way I have known not to fall for the lure of distractions is through the routine of a fixed time and place for me to write.

If I present myself, the words find a way out. Thinking doesn’t do that. Writing does.