Don’t Think to Write, Write to Think

How to use writing to get over your writer’s block

Photo: Kelly Sikkema/ Unsplash

This is one of the lessons that every writer comes to appreciate: writing is thinking. Writing is not the artifact of thinking, it’s the actual thinking process. There’s no shortage of great quotes on this topic, the implications are less clear:

Writing is the planning process and the final product: You don’t design a final piece of writing the same way you might design a computer on paper. No writing emerges complete; everything has a starting point, and it’s usually a really crummy first draft. (It might also appear as an interview, a note, etc.)

Writing as start and end point: With other processes, there are different tools for preliminary work — many things start with pen and paper, but most things transition into either different software of some sort, or into the physical realm. If you’re making a film, for example, you’d probably start off writing a screenplay, or drawing storyboards (it used to be on pen and paper, I’m sure there’s software for it now). After sketching out a design, say, you’ll load up Figma. By contrast, the materiality of writing is confusing because it starts and ends with ink on paper (or characters on a screen). Writing can start and end in Google Docs; this leads many people to think the writing process is an end…