I was thinking about the way that I write now that I am writing so much almost every day.

I write everything with a preamble, a sort of explanation. It makes a lot of sense to me. From my point of view, it is weird not to introduce the main thought that I want to talk about just before I go ahead and talk about it. The downside is that I end up losing many ideas, about 20% of them, just because I wrote some sort of introduction to the idea before I wrote down the idea itself. To be sure, good ideas are resilient, they resurface again over time. Temporarily losing some is not a big deal beyond the nagging feeling of wanting to focus on something that has gone back to the deeper substrates of the mind, the place where nucleosynthesis of ideas occurs. Anyway, I have noticed this pattern and I wanted to think about it, talk about it, analyze it and understand it better which is just a mechanism for understanding myself, but every time my thoughts landed on the topic I forgot the precise shape of what I was supposed to analyze. That is, until today.

It was not easy to keep on track; I almost lost this idea as well, the idea that I write introductory sentences or phrases on almost everything I write before actually writing the first thing that I wanted to say. I forced myself to write down the main idea first and pay attention to the introduction and preliminaries later. The way that comes naturally to me, the introductory way is how the finished product of ideation should be expressed but not how the process is more efficient. It is like wanting to hang ornaments in space before putting up the Christmas tree and being puzzled when the ornaments don’t hold in place. 

I am glad that I caught this thought right now because I want to discipline myself into writing the main idea first before I go into building the writing around it. I think this could be something much more productive for me. And I think that is how one is supposed to write. The secondary ideas can be lost if anything is going to be lost, but the main idea has always to be a priority. Isn’t that obvious? I don’t know why I always feel this need for a prior introduction. In the finished product maybe that is the way that it needs to be, but in the drafting stage, one can only be beating around the bush for so long.

From now, I’ll favor process over product in the early stages; I will focus on getting the main idea first, the same for blogging, the same for fiction writing, and everything else.

How about you, peeps? Do you ever slow down and think about the way you think? Or about the way you formulate and record ideas? Please tell us in the comments.