Micah Zarin's Blog

Adapted from my article in The Hilltop Beacon

Everyone talks about what to write, but hardly anyone talks about how to write. Or, in other words, how does one start writing? What do you write about? That small, private moment before the first sentence is weirdly existential. The cursor blinks, and the page waits. You sit down with an empty page, and suddenly your brain starts showing you nothing. Or everything except what you meant to talk about. You could go anywhere, or say anything, and that freedom can feel rather paralyzing. 

We often expect our minds to show us something relevant or something that connects to whatever we meant to say. But the mind is the mind, and so it rarely cooperates. It will often show you unhelpful things, such as a song lyric, a headline from three days ago, the exact way the light is hitting your desk or that time you said something stupid in seventh  grade. My brain, for example, does not know how to stay on task. It wanders like a dinosaur-obsessed toddler let loose in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, utterly uninterested in returning to whatever the responsible adult wants him to do.

But, what school doesn’t teach you is that wandering is part of the work. We are often led to believe that procrastination is the enemy of writing. But not all procrastination is equal. There’s a version that is destructive, like doomscrolling reels, but there’s another version that is strangely productive. You walk away, maybe reorganize your desk, or answer an email, and somewhere in that wandering, the idea ripens. The mind keeps working even when it looks idle. It’s like your thoughts are being held in suspension. 

Actually, essays are supposed to facilitate this kind of wandering. You see, schools trick us into thinking we know what an essay is. They trick us into thinking an essay is something that starts with a thesis. That you start with a position and then defend it until the last paragraph, where you say the same thing again in slightly different words. But that’s not what an essay is. The real essay came from a bored aristocrat from the 1500s named Michel de Montaigne. He coined the term essai, from the french verb essayer, meaning “to try.” So, an essai is “an attempt.” Think about what “an attempt” actually implies. It means you don’t have to know what you’re doing when you start. You didn’t have a thesis in your pocket before you sat down. You just try something out and see where it goes. 

In this sense, the act of writing is thinking. Or maybe not exactly. Because it’s not like we don’t have thoughts without writing. It’s just that our thoughts are better on paper than they are in our  heads. If you think of your thoughts as a big block of marble, then writing is chiseling the marble to give it a shape. When you have an idea in your head, it’s slippery. It sounds fine until you try to write it. In your head, you can trick yourself  into believing that you know what you mean. On paper, you can’t. You can’t hide behind a vague feeling that you “kinda get it.” You don’t really understand something unless you can explain it. And we explain best when we write it down. 

That’s why I think everyone should try writing essays, either as a study tool, or just to sharpen your thinking. And I don’t mean essays like “compare and contrast the uses of foreshadowing in To Kill A Mockingbird,” I mean attempts. You don’t write because you know. You write because you don’t. Writing is how you discover what you think. 

I know people will say: “Well I’m not a writer.” And that hesitation makes sense. I think it typically stems from a very narrow understanding of writing. For most people, “writing” has meant dutifully producing assignments in a format that was never theirs to begin with. If your only experience of writing is trying to force an idea into a five-paragraph coffin, then of course you’d say you aren’t a writer. It is quite sad to me, when someone says, “I’m not a writer.” Because what I hear is “I’ve never had the chance to see my own thoughts in the mirror long enough to recognize them.” That is a real shame to me. Because the strangest thing happens when you write: you meet yourself. And sometimes, you like what you see.