Don't Think and Write, They Say

Even the ancients knew that writing helps you think and understand. Seneca recommended an alternation between reading and writing, "so that the fruits of one's reading may be reduced to concrete form by the pen." The Renaissance statesman and philosopher Michel de Montaigne—the father of the modern essay genre—said that writing essays was his way of studying himself. There are also the famous quotes by Forster—"how do I know what I think until I see what I say?"—and Didion—"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"—so you can pick the flavor you fancy the most.

Writing doesn't just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you're bad at writing and don't like to do it, you'll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.

I've seen this over and over myself with my own work. I had vague ideas floating around in the back of my head for years, but for three decades I did nothing about them. They were disconnected sketches that would pop up in my consciousness and immediately disappear, never to be seen again.

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