Even If You Don’t Know What You’re Writing

I love the daily practice of writing–even if I don’t know what I’m writing all the time. It’s good just to sit down in front of the blank page. It’s good to contemplate. It’s good to sift through your own mind and see what’s there. It’s good to just begin.

If you do this every day, you’ll connect better to your written voice. The person you are inside will come out to play. You’ll find expression right here outside your inner world. It’s a great gift to articulate a thought into something you out there can read. Ander Monson writes when we read essays, for example, it is “as close as we can get to another person’s mind.” Writing is a way of getting close to your own mind, too–as Joan Didion famously said she writes “to know what [she] thinks.”

So keep coming to the blank page. See what you’re thinking.

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