Writing Is Thinking (582 words)
I recently wrote that writing is not thinking. I was mostly responding to AI, the way these machines appear to be thinking without actually doing so. But there is a form writing that is close to thinking, I think. Writing longhand—holding a pen or pencil or what-have-you and making intelligible marks with it—is thinking made physical.*
In November of 2020 I was at a writing residency in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains in rural Wyoming. I would sit in the early morning in my writing cabin, and, pausing occasionally to watch the dawn break over a landscape descending into winter (my how beautiful it was), I started writing longhand on a legal pad.
I had almost abstained from the residency because it seemed unfitting—me, at a place specifically set aside for artists? A few days before I left, I confessed to an old friend that I was trying to pluck up the courage to start calling myself a writer. He was very kind. “Have you ever read The Artist’s Way?” he asked.
I had not, but I had actually run across the book during a housecleaning purge a few months prior. My mom had given it to me in the 1990s, but I took one look at the cover, with its Chinese scroll painting and the subtitle “A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity” and I immediately dismissed it as yet another squishy, New Age, so-called “Eastern” piece of self-help nonsense. No: there was not the tiniest crack in my mind through which that book might have made its way through. I shelved it and forgot about it.
But I have a hard time getting rid of books, and there it was, still unread 25 years later, when I had changed enough—life had kicked me in the teeth enough—that I had nothing to lose in giving it a try. I tossed the book in my suitcase and headed to Wyoming. And that is how, in the darkness of those cold, exquisitely still mornings, I learned about the morning pages.
The author Julia Cameron instructs you to write three pages longhand every morning. It doesn’t matter what you write. You don’t show it to anybody or re-read it yourself, you just write three pages longhand, first thing in the morning. Every day.
What happens is that you flounder at first, maybe write “this is stupid,” and then you write out your mundane to-dos, and then whatever is stressful in your life, and after a few days of this, by the bottom of the second page you often arrive at the kind of thoughts that make life worth living.
The strange alchemy of mind-to-hand-to-mark-on-paper connects our mental to our physical selves, and by extension to the world our physical selves inhabit. Writing longhand daily, my mind has slowed, and I’ve discovered a way of thinking, and therefore being, that had previously eluded me. Even when I’m using a word processor (as—yes—I am now), the habit of writing longhand has changed my relationship with the words I grope for to describe what’s in my mind. That relationship with those words is less forced, less rushed, more trusting.
True, I’m not at the point of writing a book the length of Infinite Jest by hand, as David Foster Wallace did. But I now go through a legal pad every couple of weeks. I recommend it, as I recommend, freely, The Artist’s Way.
*This is probably also true of drawing.