This was a great read, and in some ways quite relatable. I like writing about things that interest me, but often found it hard to have enough confidence in my ideas to write them down. This changed when I developed some new ideas around writing, which seem comparable to the ones you wrote in your article: writing is not so much the end-product of thinking, as much as it is a part of the process of thinking. I was inspired by Karl Popper, who said in one of his essays (I can’t recall wich one but it was featured in “All Life is Problem Solving”) that writing is the objectification or externalisation of thought, and by externalising our thoughts we put them “out there” for other people and ourselves to scrutinize. To me this is a very liberating idea: writing isn’t just for people who know what they think, but also (and maybe especially) for people who are trying to find out what they think.
This was a great read, and in some ways quite relatable. I like writing about things that interest me, but often found it hard to have enough confidence in my ideas to write them down. This changed when I developed some new ideas around writing, which seem comparable to the ones you wrote in your article: writing is not so much the end-product of thinking, as much as it is a part of the process of thinking. I was inspired by Karl Popper, who said in one of his essays (I can’t recall wich one but it was featured in “All Life is Problem Solving”) that writing is the objectification or externalisation of thought, and by externalising our thoughts we put them “out there” for other people and ourselves to scrutinize. To me this is a very liberating idea: writing isn’t just for people who know what they think, but also (and maybe especially) for people who are trying to find out what they think.