4/26: writing as thinking

When I worked as an undergraduate in my alma mater's Writing Center, "writing is thinking" was a mantra. And I understood what it meant, in the abstract at least: writing is one way to process ideas, to learn exactly what one does think, and maybe even to discover that one thinks something unexpected. But in my own academic writing, my ideas are very mapped-out in advance, to the paragraph-level and then even the sentence-level, and so I rarely experience an "ah ha!" moment of thought-discovery while actually putting words together on paper. That's not to say that I find it boring to write. I enjoy it for other reasons--for instance, the satisfaction of putting words together in pleasing ways or connecting ideas especially clearly. But today, with my morning journalling, I did think and write simultaneously--indistinguishably--about A Room With a View, and it was really fun.