Writing is to organise ideas - the ideas you scribble on serviettes, sweets wrappers and coffee shop receipts, the ideas that have been circling in your head for days. To write, you need to collect the ideas first, refine them and develop insights. Staring at a blank paper will not magically inspire you with relevant examples or concrete evidence to support your arguments.
Writing is a bottom-up building process. The key to this process is to collect ideas constantly. It is to understand what you already have and what is still missing. Do more research and update your existing pile of scrawls. Repeat the process to refine your ideas, connect the dots, and form new insights. In the book The Fieldstone Method, Gerald M. Weinberg describes the process of collecting fieldstone for building dry stone walls. To build a great dry stone wall, you’ll need to collect a large number of stones and discard a slightly less large amount.
Reference
- Weinberg, G.M. (2006). Weinberg on Writing. Dorset House Publishing Company, Incorporated.