Write to Think

“Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.”

• Don DeLillo, winner of the National Book Award for “White Noise”

DeLillo is on to something.

The word think has several Old English meanings: to imagine, conceive in the mind, consider, meditate, remember. The word originally meant to “cause to appear to oneself.”

Thinking is gratitude. To go from “think” to “thank” you only have to change one vowel!

To write is to think, to explore a subject, a conundrum, or a character.

As a poet, I will write about a single word in order to learn about it: “density,” “denial,” or “resilience.”

I will take a hunch and track it down with my thinking about it, which I will express as simply, compellingly and eloquently as I can. Sometimes that’s a poem, and other times that’s an essay or a short story. One day, it might be an entire novel.

Neuroscience is showing that our complex and evolved human brain is highly plastic and underutilized. Your brain weighs just three pounds but consumes 20% of your oxygen and requires an oversized share of your body’s metabolism to keep it firing like a supercomputer. Maybe writing is a way to tap into some of that capacity.

What about you?

Do you write in order to think more clearly?

Is your thinking taking you anywhere?