Yesterday I told Beth that writing my thoughts is hard because I think so much faster than I can write. This was supposed to sound vain but was also true. Then again it’s probably true for everyone.

Things seem worth writing about because they occur to me in constellations of seven or eight points. The connections between these points make sense to me because of how my pre-existing thoughts were configured, but in most cases I tend to doubt that they will be apparent to anyone else. So the task of writing is pretty much the task of explicating these long strands that lead from one point to the next, which were never really part of my thought process in the first place. (Which is a shortcoming, right? Both as a communicator and a thinker? Is it better to think things irrationally and then test them for rationality, or is it better to always stick to the rules?) By the time I’ve explained my way from point one to point two, all the interest has been drained out of the subject for me and for the reader and I end up wrapping things up in a spirit of futility, never having quite said what I was excited about in the first place.

Beth said that this was indeed a problem for me and made a good case for my not writing that way anymore. So from now on: more points, less explaining. More concise, less clear! Better to build something opaque and then cut windows in it rather then stretch everything too thin in quest of transparency. This is, I think, a silly putty metaphor.