Hmm, also, writing can be an excuse for generating ideas! The obvious thing to do would be to wait for good ideas to come into your head, then write them up for the world to see. But in my experience, writing and having my writing read boosts my ego, which somehow encourages my subconscious to throw up ideas which can be written up to derive yet more ego boosts. It’s a virtuous cycle. Which makes not writing because you can’t think up any good ideas a vicious one.
This is very true. Not only does writing help me come up with ideas of unrelated posts, writing a post often gives me ideas for further related posts as I think about the issue more.
I’ve seen at least one professional writer refer to creativity as a muscle—it gets stronger the more you use it. This seems right in my experience.
I strongly agree with this sentiment. I keep a folder for this very purpose; whenever an interesting thought comes to mind I type it up along with as many of the related strands of thought as I can as quickly as possible and then save it to the folder and move on. I’ve found that this is a fairly useful procedure for organizing my thoughts and documenting my progress in my various areas of interest.
Wouldn’t doing that (instead of writing up the whole argument in a full text) make you feel as if you’ve already achieved the materialization of the idea, hence reducing your motivation to write it in the future (which might lead to never actually writing the text)?
I’m only talking about rough sketches, very short, maybe three or four paragraphs. The material in and of itself is not something I would even want use in the future. Think of it as an artist’s sketch pad; I practice (1) the purely technical aspect of my writing (2) my ability to quickly convey ideas (3) I consolidate information that was previously floating about in my skull into a nice package by anchoring it to a single event.
It’s much the same with guitar or visual art (a least for myself): I may work creatively on one technique by using it to write some nice riffs on guitar or I may try to consolidate the technique of pointillism into my repertoire by using it to draw a face or a land scape. The outcomes of each of these mini-studies is not an end in itself, but rather a stepping stone to mastery.
Hmm, also, writing can be an excuse for generating ideas! The obvious thing to do would be to wait for good ideas to come into your head, then write them up for the world to see. But in my experience, writing and having my writing read boosts my ego, which somehow encourages my subconscious to throw up ideas which can be written up to derive yet more ego boosts. It’s a virtuous cycle. Which makes not writing because you can’t think up any good ideas a vicious one.
This is very true. Not only does writing help me come up with ideas of unrelated posts, writing a post often gives me ideas for further related posts as I think about the issue more.
I’ve seen at least one professional writer refer to creativity as a muscle—it gets stronger the more you use it. This seems right in my experience.
I strongly agree with this sentiment. I keep a folder for this very purpose; whenever an interesting thought comes to mind I type it up along with as many of the related strands of thought as I can as quickly as possible and then save it to the folder and move on. I’ve found that this is a fairly useful procedure for organizing my thoughts and documenting my progress in my various areas of interest.
Wouldn’t doing that (instead of writing up the whole argument in a full text) make you feel as if you’ve already achieved the materialization of the idea, hence reducing your motivation to write it in the future (which might lead to never actually writing the text)?
I’m only talking about rough sketches, very short, maybe three or four paragraphs. The material in and of itself is not something I would even want use in the future. Think of it as an artist’s sketch pad; I practice (1) the purely technical aspect of my writing (2) my ability to quickly convey ideas (3) I consolidate information that was previously floating about in my skull into a nice package by anchoring it to a single event.
It’s much the same with guitar or visual art (a least for myself): I may work creatively on one technique by using it to write some nice riffs on guitar or I may try to consolidate the technique of pointillism into my repertoire by using it to draw a face or a land scape. The outcomes of each of these mini-studies is not an end in itself, but rather a stepping stone to mastery.