Writing | Kaelan

I used to think writing was recording thoughts. You have an idea, you write it down. But that’s not how it works. Writing is where I find out what I think.

The sentence that seemed clear in my head turns to mush on the page. Good. Now I can see what’s wrong with it. The brain is a terrible editor of its own ideas. It skips gaps, fills in blanks, mistakes familiarity for understanding. Writing forces everything into the open.

There’s a paradox I keep hitting. The more I understand something, the harder the first draft.

Experts struggle to write because they see the full complexity. Novices write easily because they don’t. I’ll start a paragraph, then realize it needs three qualifications, two exceptions, and a distinction I haven’t made yet. Meanwhile someone who learned the topic last week cranks out confident blog posts.

The solution isn’t to ignore the complexity. It’s to compress it. Find the smallest thing that preserves the essential relationships. Cut everything else.

I’ve started thinking of writing in three modes:

Writing to think. Private, messy, exploratory. Working through a problem. The goal is to externalize cognition, not to communicate. Most writing should probably be this.

Writing to learn. Pick a topic you want to understand and try to explain it. The gaps in your explanation are gaps in your understanding. Feynman’s technique: explain it to an imaginary student.

Writing to communicate. The smallest category. Now you’re crafting for a reader. But even here, structure matters more than polish. A clear argument with rough prose beats elegant confusion.

The fear is that you have nothing to say. But I don’t think that’s actually the problem. The problem is you don’t know what you think until you try to say it.

Waiting for inspiration is waiting for understanding to arrive pre-packaged. It doesn’t. Understanding gets built through articulation. You think you’re blocked because you lack ideas. You’re probably blocked because you lack courage — the courage to write badly long enough to discover what you mean.

The way out is through. Write garbage. Then fix it.

What separates writers from people who write?

Writers sit down when they don’t feel like it. They write when they have nothing to say. They’ve learned that the feeling of having something to say comes after writing, not before.

The habit matters more than the talent. A writer who writes 500 words daily will outproduce a genius who waits for inspiration. The consistency compounds. The regular writer is never starting cold.

There are properties you can check:

Clarity. Can someone unfamiliar with the topic follow your argument? Read it aloud. Where you stumble, readers stumble.

Compression. Have you said it in as few words as possible? Cut 20%, then cut again.

Structure. Can you summarize each section in one sentence? If not, it’s doing too much.

Honesty. Have you acknowledged what you don’t know? Readers trust writers who show uncertainty.

Voice. Does it sound like a person? Remove the words you’d never say aloud.

Go Deeper

Books

On Writing Well by William Zinsser — The classic on nonfiction. Practical, warm, short.
The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker — Cognitive science meets prose style.
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott — The psychology of writing. Permission to write badly.
Draft No. 4 by John McPhee — A master on structure and process.

Essays

“Putting Ideas into Words” by Paul Graham — Writing as a thinking tool.
“Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell — Clarity as ethics.