Trust me, you don't want to write at the speed of thought

On writing slowly to live better

Photo by Gary Bendig on Unsplash

Writing Fast and Slow

Ever since I realized I could turn all my vain imaginings into some kind of tangible reality with words on a page, I’ve loved writing. It was my outlet for pure creative energy. I could conjure souls from the ether, construct worlds ex nihilo.

But the slowness of it frustrated me. I pined for some future technology that would allow writing at the speed of thought, or the marvelous ability to capture the vivid images and scenes from my mind onto a screen for other people to see and hear, to experience the way I experienced them.

This frustration with the heavy compression of writing as a medium is the reason I do almost all of it with a keyboard. It’s faster, by a lot. I do love the tactile experience of pulling a pen across paper, but I haven’t yet learned to ignore the part of my mind that screams about how inefficient it is.

Well, the technology of my dreams has finally arrived.

BMIs

You’ve heard of these by now, probably.

No, not Body Mass Indexes — Brain Machine Interfaces.

Neuralink designed a chip that lets you move a mouse with your mind. That’s actually old news. And then back in August (still ancient history, but slightly more recent), a different company unveiled an even smaller chip that can convert thoughts to text.

This stuff isn’t readily available to the general public, of course. But it will be. And when it is, it will swiftly usher in a weird and wild future.

If you’re a longtime reader of Dispatches, it probably won’t surprise you that I’m not here to talk about how great it’s going to be. Instead, I’m here to suggest that a chip that lets you write as fast as you think might not be a good thing.

Not that it’s bad that this technology exists, but that it will present a temptation that it would be wise to resist.

The point I shall now earnestly endeavor to make is that it’s good, actually, that you can’t write as fast as your brain races.

For anyone who writes for a living or for fun or because they are tortured by a relentless compulsion (or some combination of the three), this point will not be intuitive.

So let’s start way back at the root, and talk about what thoughts are.

False Abundance

The mind creates thoughts like the ocean creates waves. Endless.

We can’t even call this production of thought abundant, because that would connote value of some kind. Thoughts, of themselves, are evaluatively neutral. They can be valuable, or they can be detrimental. It all depends on what you do with them. If you ignore them entirely, they go away entirely. Maybe they come back (waves on the shore), but they’ll go away again just the same.

It is when you choose a thought to capture, to enflesh it with action, that its neutral state breaks good or bad. (Or often a complicated mix.) It is in the alchemy of action that thoughts gain positive or negative value.

Incarnation

Writing is the action of capturing thought in flesh. Even if it’s just pixels on a screen (I almost always type when I write) — it is still the conversion of ephemeral thought, which is nothing more than literal waves in the brain, into a substantial reality that can be witnessed with physical senses. I can see these words on the page, and you can, too. Change hath been wrought. Perhaps minor, perhaps no more significant than a passing breeze, but no less real.

OK, so why is it good that we cannot write at the speed of thought?

For the same reason many of the best writers still do their first drafts with pen and paper, one of the slowest ways possible.

The slower you write, the more time you have to choose which of the multiplicity of compounding brainwaves to give the honor of physical expression. It happens one word or phrase at a time.

You might think you have a whole idea, a whole paragraph! But I would bet there has never been a whole paragraph written that first appeared word perfect in the brain. The careful cognitive selection process discards a hundred words for each one that manages to move fingers over a keyboard or around a pen.

Writing to Think

This is process of cognitive selection is different than editing.

It is, rather, the business of practicing a more deliberate and focused mode of thought production. Writing is thinking. But not just any kind of thinking. Getting “lost in thought” is the opposite of writing. The thinking of writing is entirely unlike daydreaming or future tripping or having a full on panic attack, as the mind races in as many directions as it can, all at once.

What if we could capture all the thoughts of a mind lost in them that way? Imagine the endless reams of paper, the bottomless digital document that would be required to record even three minutes of that sort of thing.

The Journaling Problem

I more or less gave up on longform journaling many years ago, despite multiple valiant efforts. I always got bogged down by the same thing every time. I would start writing, and thirty minutes later I might have covered 5% of what I intended to write about.

It would take all day to fully capture less than half an hour of real life, and all the thoughts and feelings I experienced in conjunction with it. And of course that’s to say nothing of the fractal loops of self-referencing introspection.

It never ends.

If I ever start introspective journaling again (and I’d like to!) it’ll be with the conscious understanding that the point isn’t to “capture” it all. The point is to pick something to say about the day, about the life I’m living, and my own unique collection of qualia. Not everything, just something. A few things, maybe, if there’s time.

Cognitive Expenses

This slow process of plucking words and phrases from the busy river of thoughts costs a lot. It’s why writers complain about how hard writing is. They almost can’t help themselves, even if they don’t know why it’s hard, they can feel it. They can feel the heavy tax on their reserves of decision-making energy.

But, according to one of the most fundamental laws of true abundance, the more energy you spend making decisions, the more energy you’ll have to make decisions later.

Just like any other kind of exercise. The more weight I lift today, the more I’ll be able to lift tomorrow.

So I try not to complain, the same way an athlete tries not to complain. I understand that this process is slow, and painstaking. I understand that I will feel anxious about whether I have plucked the right words from the river.

If I accept all this, and show up to exercise this mystical power of incarnating thought every day, then my reserves will deepen, and I will get better and better at the business of living.