I don’t know how many times I’ve looked through the drafts I’ve written for Marshallogue posts. I know the number of drafts passed 200 a while ago. I keep coming back to them, though, when I need something to write, an idea for inspiration.
What I find are a bunch of incomplete thoughts. In my head, they seem so developed and organized. On the screen, I might not even have a full sentence, just a phrase or a headline.
That’s one of the benefits of writing. In my head, the ideas seem complete, but in reality – the reality outside my head – the ideas seem barely intelligible. In fact, most people other than me couldn’t make out what the snippets denote.
Writing completes thoughts. It forces full ideas to emerge. It highlights the contradictions, compelling the reader to make a decision instead of ignoring the inconsistencies. Writing exposes wandering.
It’s not that writing and thinking are fundamentally different. It’s that writing reveals what thinking actually looks like. It freezes it, for everyone to scrutinize, including the author of those thoughts.
