Clarity, Power, and Discovery in Writing

It's only by putting our thoughts into language* that we can clarify them, sort them out, and develop them. When a thought first occurs to us, generally it's in very low resolution. Something to the effect of "Hey, I should do a thread about discovery writing!" No, actually more like "Discovery writing is an excellent tool that helps you organize your ideas." Then, if you pursue that, you can have a series of other ideas relating to it and work out some areas that might need clarification or refining, or fill in some blanks you didn't know you had in your understanding. But the problem with just doing it in your head as thoughts is, they slip away and soon you can't remember them. Even a few minutes later, if you had a lot of ideas, most of them are gone.

But there's something more to it. Thinking silently, just in your head, is still a bit vague. To really clarify thoughts and see them or hear them in higher resolution, you need to either speak them out loud or write them. That's the ultimate form of language, usually directed at other people. When it's just in your own head you'll often leave many parts vague, because you think—"Oh, I know all about that, there's no need to delve into it." But if you don't put it clearly into words, you don't know how well you actually know it. And of course, if you speak the words, they're also gone pretty soon, unless you recorded them or something. But then you need to transcribe it to work on it. So for me writing is the ultimate way to clarify and develop your ideas.

The very act of arranging ideas and thoughts into sentence form, and the sentences into paragraph form, will reveal how much you actually know, and with how much clarity. Then as you edit you're filling in those blank areas and sharpening up the fuzzy ones. It forces you to go into high resolution on every aspect of it, and go through it letter by letter, word by word. That's what you call a fine tooth comb. By the time you get through it all, you'll know where you still need to think more.

* Or visuals, depending on what kind of thoughts they are.

At the end of the third video, when he gets to Tantalizing—what he's talking about is what Bill Johnson says in A Story is a Promise, specifically in the article I keep posting in here called:

• Bringing the Dead to Life

"I'm always curious when a book becomes a phenomena (-on). Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer, is such a novel. So I bought it to see how the story 'works' to draw in its audience. In these notes I'll begin by breaking down the novel's opening preface line by line.

First line,

I'd never given much thought to how I would die--though I'd had reason enough in the last few months--but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.​

This is pure drama, which I define as an anticipation of an outcome. There are many dramatic questions here.

• Why did the narrator have reasons to imagine his or her death?
• What kind of death is the narrator facing, that he or she couldn't have imagined it?
• What situation does the narrator find him or herself in?
• Where is the narrator? (I don't think this one is dramatic)

​

To get the answer to these questions, the reader has to read the next sentence. That is the prime responsibility of the first sentence of a novel, that a reader be compelled to read a second sentence. That's why this kind of mysterious first sentence is often seen in popular novels. A first sentence that is not compelling becomes a first step in a reader disengaging from a novel. I teach that it's three steps and the reader is gone."
​

There's more, and it's just as powerful. This is some amazing stuff. If you can learn it and use it well, you'll be a powerhouse writer. Download this as a PDF, print it up, read it every day, and try it yourself, over and over until you get it down. And a tip—it doesn't just have to be at the beginning of the story.

Here's why a journal is extremely helpful in discovery writing:

When you have a particular topic in mind, you write about it. Try to be organized so you're covering the topic pretty thoroughly. It can help to organize things into bullet point or outline form. It can help even more to put things into the form of questions. Then over the next day or so organize your list of bullet points or questions, combine any that cover the same area of the topic etc. See if there are any major sub-areas you haven't covered. If so jot those down real quick. Then start writing to try to answer the questions, or to fill in and flesh out the sub-areas you've created. This will show you what you know and what you don't know on the topic. Things get most interesting in the region of things you don't know.

Try to think your way through the mysterious areas. Just meander freeform, and as you go you'll often find you come up with some ideas. Some of them may be pretty good, some of them are totally out in left field. Just keep doing the brainstorming session for a while, and then write to flesh out the ideas or to further explore the areas you've tried to fill in.

The mind is a question/answer machine. That's actually not a good way to express it (that thought just occurred to me because after writing it my editing-self flashed a red light). A mind is not a machine. But that's how I've heard it put before. Maybe engine is a better term (not really), or maybe it's better just to say—"The mind has a way of asking questions and then answering them." That's better, but it could be refined. See, already I'm refining, just because I noticed machine isn't quite the right word.

It's the conscious mind that usually asks the questions, that fills in the bullet point lists, and that does much of the work. It's sometimes the conscious mind that comes up with answers, just by exploring and pondering. But often the unconscious will give some input as well. Intuition, or just putting odd ideas together almost randomly to see what possible solutions it might come up with. The unconscious is far more creative than the conscious—it's the chaos brain, after all, designed for this purpose. Maybe perfectly suited for is a better term, I don't want this to turn into a ramble about intelligent design. See, again, I'm refining my thoughts on the topic and re-centering the areas of inquiry. And really it's editing that does it. Read over what you've written, fix things up a bit, gradually get it better organized and fix the wrong words and terms, fill in areas you left largely blank. This is just editing. But it's also your conscious and unconscious minds working in unison to solve problems. The conscious mind is pretty good at working within the realm of the known. That's its function (sounds better than 'what it was designed for'). I posted a Jordan Peterson video some time back covering this material—the conscious mind is set up in such a way that it deals with what you're already familiar with, while the unconscious kicks in particularly in trying to deal with the unfamiliar. It works much faster and more efficiently than the conscious mind, because it works 'in parallel' rather than 'in serial' (to borrow those perhaps ill-fitting computer network terms). Another area to look into re-wording, and re-wording is filling-in and fleshing-out and refining.

The unconscious is capable of running multiple computations (wrong word—maybe problems) all at the same time, whereas the conscious mind is wired (?! works maybe) differently. It can only think about one thing at a time, and it does it best when thinking in language. Both parts of that equation (?) cause the conscious mind to be much slower, but at the same time more deliberate (which means it allows and requires conscious deliberation, aka pondering and thinking). The reason for this is that the unconscious is set up (better term than designed, could still use work) to work instantly, for those times when you notice a cave bear (or an oncoming car) threatening, or it might be threatening. You need an instantaneous reaction sometimes, so one is provided by the unconscious. It relies on things like instinct, intuition, and snap judgement, because you need to do something really fast to save your life. You react well before you've had any time to deliberate consciously on the problem. Like when I would be riding a bike and find myself starting to capsize (nautical term?)—in a lightning-fast reaction my left hand (always) would flash out, grab the handlebars, and get the bike back in balance. This is part of what led to my theory that the unconscious is for in-the-moment decisions, and the conscious more for reflection after-the-fact. It allows us to evaluate the instant snap decisions of the unconscious, those ancient instincts or intuitions, and see if maybe next time something better would work. I'm not sure if it would be able to implement the something better next time, probably only if you practice it over and over like a martial artist doing drills, to ingrain it into the unconscious.

I didn't intend for this to be so long, but I ended up filling in some blanks and explaining some things in more detail than I intended to, as well as demonstrating the editing process in action. Now I need to go back and separate some of that into paragraphs, and I might need to break this in half and post some as a separate entry. It probably runs way over the word limit (yep, had to break it where I did).

Of course, you run one big risk doing things this way (thinking through things in successive waves of editing and revision). You can end up making multiple posts in a row on message boards. Take it from one who knows.