Writing is how you complete your thoughts.
An excellent quote from a piece on writing by Drew Magary. He writes about how he keeps a notebook of as-yet unformed thoughts so he never starts with the dreaded Blank White Page. Once you have collected all that primordial material:
Then you get to catalog it, tinker with it, and puzzle it over.
This gets to the core why I prefer writing to live debate… as the thoughts in my brain pass to my mouth, they remain incomplete (malformed?). I prefer the reorganizing, the working out of all paths, the understanding myself to make it understandable to others. Drew quotes author George Saunders:
Writing is a matter of sketching and building and arranging and fixing what is in your brain.
Even take this blog. Most of the stuff I write here is half-formed. Some might call it anodyne or callow. To me blogging has always been about sparking a conversation, a small slip of litmus paper to be dipped into public discussion — the reaction leads to refinement (or outright refutation!) which is ultimately the desired result. The Blank White Page too does not require perfection. It is merely a piece of litmus paper, waiting for your experimental thoughts.
