Thinking on the Page 📄 ✍️ 🤔

Some of us spend more time thinking about our writing projects than actually writing them. While thinking about our projects is an important part of creativity, it never yields the same results as thinking with our pens on the page.

Why? We think differently while writing. Don’t take my word for it, try it. Think about an issue in your life—writing-based or not. Then follow these two steps:

1) Take five or ten minutes and go through the mental process of assessing the issue from different angles. In other words: just think about it.

2) Next, take the same amount of time and write-think on the page (long-hand on paper, ideally).

It’s important to keep your pen moving the whole time—repeat the same words or questions if you want, but don’t stop writing to go back to thinking only. That will break the flow. If you hand-write for a full page, which should take around ten minutes or so, I guarantee some new insights will emerge that you couldn’t have imagined without a pen in your hand.

We write-think all the time when we make lists or send notes or cards to friends or family members. And if you’re a regular journaler, you know this write-think process well and probably wouldn’t trust yourself to only think about a life issue; you know you need to write about it too.

Because I believe in walking the talk, I took myself through a little exercise to prove this point. I thought of a question, a “problem” I’d like to address, and I set my timer for five minutes and let myself just think it through for that amount of time. Then I set the timer for five minutes again and wrote out some thoughts to that question. They were completely different experiences.

My question: How can I make more time for my own creative writing?

While I thought about it, using only my mind, I noticed several things. 

First, I went immediately to problem-solving. I listed several things I could try, from getting up earlier, to saying "no" to more things, to figuring out what I might write about that could elicit greater personal motivation to write, etc. I didn’t land on any one solution, per se, but I was left feeling like I wasn’t yet doing “enough” in support of my writing, or I was doing too much in other arenas and not having time to write was the necessary consequence. 

Second, I noticed I couldn’t stay focused on that one question for long. My mind wanted to hop to other ideas, to look out the window and wonder what else was going on outside, to move on to another topic, or get up and do something else. At the 2.5 minute mark I was no longer focused! It reminded me of mediation guidelines about not being attached thoughts and letting them pass by, yet the whole intention was to focus on that one thought. 

Third, I didn’t end up with a real solution at all. Ideas floated around, were considered briefly, and then sacrificed to distractions. It felt like a long five minutes.

I then shifted to the page. I wrote out the question, set the timer for five minutes, and responded through writing. I started out with the initial thinking solutions: “I could get up earlier. Or I could learn to say no to other things.” But before too long I was asking deeper questions about love and service, basically getting at the root of the problem that lies below my conscious mind. It was a journey from the problem-question to what I feel I’ve lost touch with in my writing and myself, while also realizing how much I love my work with other people’s writing, how I feel I’m in my element doing that work, and how that feels like a worthwhile offering to others. So, no “solutions” yet, but a deeper understanding of what the problem really might be. Without writing-thinking, I would not have arrived at this personal insight: that this service I offer others is something I can offer myself too. 

The last two lines of my five minutes of writing rephrases the question and hints at a deeper approach to a solution: “How could ‘making more time for creative writing’ be a service to me? Something I give myself, a person equally worthy of my time, love, and attention as the other people in my life.”

The timer went off. It felt like a short five minutes. (You can see a photo of my page below.)

It’s not the content of the question, the thoughts, or the writing-thoughts that really matter; it’s the process, the very different experiences of thinking on the page versus off the page. Use this process to ask and answer questions you have about your story’s structure, characters, theme, plot, or scene issues—or anything else related to your writing project, or, as in my case, with your writing process.

“I write entirely to know what I’m thinking.”

~ Joan Didion ~