For those of us with woefully average gray matter, our minds have limited reach. For the past, they are enthusiastic but incompetent archivists. In the present, they reach for the most provocative fragments of ideas, often preferring distraction over clarity.

Writing provides scaffolding. Structure for the unstructured, undisciplined mind. It’s a practical tool for thinking more effectively. And sometimes, it’s the best way to truly begin to think at all.

Let’s call your mind’s default setting ‘perpetual approximation mode.’  A business idea, a scrap of gossip, a trivial fact, a romantic interest, a shower argument to reconcile something long past. We spend more time mentally rehearsing activities than actually doing them. You can spend your entire life hopping among these shiny fragments without searching for underlying meaning until tragedy, chaos, or opportunity slaps you into awareness.

Writing forces you to tidy that mental clutter. To articulate things with a level of context and coherence the mind alone can’t achieve. Writing expands your working memory, lets you be more brilliant on paper than you can be in person.

While some of this brilliance comes from enabling us to connect larger and larger ideas, much of it comes from stopping, uh, non-brilliance. Writing reveals what you don’t know, what you can’t see when an idea is only held in your head. Biases, blind spots, and assumptions you can’t grasp internally.

At its best, writing (and reading) can reveal the ugly, uncomfortable, or unrealistic parts of your ideas. It can pluck out parasitic ideas burrowed so deeply that they imperceptibly steer your feelings and beliefs. Sometimes this uprooting will reveal that the lustrous potential of a new idea is a mirage, or that your understanding of someone’s motives was incomplete, maybe projected.

If you’re repeatedly drawn to a thought, feeling, or belief, write it out. Be fast, be sloppy. Just as children ask why, why, why, you can repeat the question “why do I think/feel/believe this?” a few times. What plops onto the paper may surprise you. So too will the headspace that clears from pouring out the canned spaghetti of unconnected thoughts.

“Writing about yourself seems to be a lot like sticking a branch into clear river-water and roiling up the muddy bottom.”

~Stephen King, Different Seasons (Book)

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

~Joan Didion, Why I Write (Article)