Enthusiasms

I don’t carry a sketchbook to write down ideas. I don’t write drafts in notebooks. Instead, I write and rewrite ideas in my head. I’m not talking about general ideas here; I assume everyone, or at least everyone who cares, thinks about what they want to write before they sit down to write a serious text. Even those who say they think by writing, I assume, don’t sit down to write with literally no idea at all which direction to go. Writing is premeditated: despite what some may say, the right words do not come delivered from heaven by an angel or a muse. No, I don’t mean general ideas: I mean I write long texts, word-for-word, in my head. Then I rearrange them, tweak them, rewrite or reject them. This text, for instance, was originally written on the way to the grocery store, the writing occasionally interrupted by oh my god this is chilly as my immediate senses for a moment direct my attention away from thoughts and into the concrete world. In this case, the latency between writing the text in my head and writing it into a text box was short: I just got back and started writing. Other times, I’ll mull a text over for many days before committing it to paper or bytes.

The texts I write in my head are often nothing like the ones I end up publishing or archiving. So far, this post contains almost nothing of my “mental drafts”, but I’m convinced that it’s better because I “wrote” them.

If you accept that considered writing doesn’t occur simply at the moment a person writes it, it may seem obvious that you do something like writing a mental draft of the text beforehand. This, I think, stems from the assumption that when we think, we think in one of the languages we speak. “What language do you think in?” is a question sometimes posed to bilinguals. I think that question presupposes a major misconception about the nature of thought. I don’t think thought is formed in any given natural language in general, although we obviously do think in natural language at least sometimes — when we’re deciding what to say or put into writing. The question, however, is whether the thought processes that occur prior to our decision to put it into language are in the same language, or if they are in some kind of “mentalese”. Do you think in English, Japanese, Spanish, Basque, Ojibwe, Inuktitut?

There are a number of reasons why I think that’s not the case. The first is introspection. It doesn’t really feel like I’m thinking in any specific language when I’m thinking. Not to mention it would imply a strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, one that says the limits of our thoughts are decided by the limits of our language, and that the categories and ways of speaking of our language determine the categories and ways of thinking of our mind. The evidence, such as it is, doesn’t support a strong version of this hypothesis (although it may still fit weaker, more specialized variants of it: after all, it would be strange if language did not at all affect patterns of thought). My own introspection doesn’t have access to anyone else’s experience, of course, and clearly some people do feel they think in a language, since they say they “think in Spanish” or “think in English” and so on. But a very common occurrence seems to rule this out: when we can’t put something we want to say into words. We may feel it, we may think it, but we don’t know how to put it into words. In addition to all of this, it would seem to make little evolutionary sense. As far as we know the human brain was fully developed, or close to it, before we started speaking. Humans must have had thoughts, complex thoughts as evidenced by the use of tools, by social organization and rituals related to death, before the advent of language, and so our brains must include a fully developed mechanism for thinking without language; it would be grossly inefficient if language suddenly came to replace this mechanism for thinking in general.

For all of these reasons, I think our thought in general isn’t mediated by natural language. The precise extent of thinking in natural language, the nature of whatever mental language we do think in, and so on, are interesting issues, but kind of beside the point. This whole aside was simply to ground the idea that it isn’t self-evident that if you think about a text before you write it, you must have already written a kind of mental draft.

You must, then, consciously decide to write a draft in your head, word-for-word. There are advantages and disadvantages to this approach. The human mind has limited working memory, and not everything in that working memory stays in long-term memory, and when it does, the reproduction isn’t particularly accurate. But what you lose in capacity and accuracy, you gain in flexibility. I’ve heard that some recommend using cheap paper to sketch ideas, so you aren’t afraid of putting down bad ideas, but mental drafts are absolutely free. And they’re instant: there is zero lag between the moment you think of a phrase and the moment that phrase appears in your draft. You can write anywhere, without having to worry about bringing pen and paper: in the shower, sure, that’s classic, but also on the bus, on your way to the store, when your mind wanders and you should be doing something else, when you’re trying to get to sleep, when you’re fishing, whenever you have some spare attention. You’re not wasting any storage, and therefore, writing and rewriting is free. And you’re free to mix and match “mentalese” and English: if at some point you know what you want to say, but can’t figure out how to say it, you can just leave a hole in the English text and a note to translate the mentalese later. If I was a good drawer I’d put in an illustration about here of neurons and words flying between them, a vast network of them with words flying over synapses at record speed, and in the middle, a section of the network where the words are replaced by indecipherable symbols representing the language of thought, the one that cannot be communicated from one person to another except through a translation to natural language. (At this point, you could insert a fascinating discussion about whether the nature of thought is ultimately symbolic, which seems to be a common assumption these days, or whether thought is or could possibly be nonsymbolic, but that would take us too far afield.)

By having to store a copy of the text in your brain, which is an unreliable database at best and has limited capacity for adding new entries, you lose textual accuracy. Sometimes you lose brilliant ideas because you didn’t store them outside your brain: when you have an epiphany right before falling asleep, you often don’t remember a thing in the morning. If a quarter of the ideas that seem world-changing in the half-wake dream-state that happens before you really fall asleep but after you’ve lost waking consciousness were as good as I imagined them to be, and further, if I could only remember them, I’m sure I’d be rich and famous or at least moderately successful in whatever. Those ideas are lost. But what you lose in textual accuracy, you gain in understanding. While you may lose the perfect wording, or a complete thought, when you do remember a thought, you will usually understand it fully, which may not be the case if you had to translate it from mentalese into English and put it into writing. The general gist of something is very hard to lose if you have some recollection of the memory; however, if your only memory is a piece of writing, you may have the words exactly as you wrote them, but lack the understanding that gave birth to them in the first place.

This process of deliberating over words before you write them, of “writing” them before you actually write them, must have some effect on the final text, but I couldn’t say exactly what that effect might be. As you can gather, I’m not one of those people who insist that their best thinking is done as they write, but what I do is writing, not mere typing. (Truman Capote famously said of the Beat writers something to the effect of, “What they’re doing isn’t writing, it’s typing.”) I don’t sit down with a clear plan and then execute it to the letter. Looking over this first draft, which is not the first draft of this post but the first digital draft, it contains few of the words I thought up on my way to the store. That whole aside about mentalese was something I thought of on the spot. Most of the individual sentences were formed just before or even as I typed them.

Maybe it’s all an excuse to avoid editing, which, you’ve got to admit, is terribly boring. Editing in your head is so much more pleasant: if you can tell yourself you’re already on draft forty-five by the time you commit something to paper or computer, you don’t have to clean up and edit so much.

Or maybe I’m just weird.