---
title: How To Write
date: 2026-04-06
layout: column.njk
tags: column
permalink: /columns/2026/how-to-write/
---

## Prompt
- The kernel of an idea
- It's generally recommended to plant a seed first
    - something you can return to over time
    - reference other ideas you come across
    - develop and refine

## Questions
- Questions give structure to your work
- Even implicit ones - the unsaid queries that motivate the composition of the piece
    - what's included, and when?
    - as important: what's left out?
    - make everything a deliberate choice
- Why write, if not to test an idea against your own specific qualities? To see if there's a reaction, some expansiveness or contraction.
- They provide the substrate to thought, and the nourishment, encouraging the frontier to expand

## Rough Notes
- The heap
- The outlet for stream of consciousness thinking
    - See what associations bubble up to the surface
    - See what resonates, what clusters, the affinities that form
- The warmup

## Quotes
- For the sake of having an opinion, I say it's better to rearticulate someone's idea in your own words, to digest it with your own acuity, than to simply reexpress the idea as a quote.
- Other than stating something factually: at such a time, such a thing was said
- Refernce it, so motivated readers can connect with more writing that may expand on the idea.
- But don't just repeat the statement verbatim. Connect with the idea, exppress it in your own way for your own audience. Make it available.