Spontaneous vs planned writing
I’ve noticed many interesting differences between writing I do spontaneously and writing I plan. I was curious why these two modes feel so different and yield works of different quality and style, so I did some digging. This post summarizes my findings and thoughts.
In the morning, I write spontaneously. It’s always an adventure, a trip through the maze, a trail to the unknown. It starts with an idea of interest hitting my mind. I choose to follow it; to turn my attention to it and to explore it further. As I do that, various thoughts and realizations about that idea spring to mind, and I weave them into the linear structure of text. It is an act of improvisation, this one. That’s why it’s structure may be imperfect but the freshness of it most certainly is. In that, it’s like a crisp, freshly baked croissant from a family-owned bakery on the corner of Montmartre: an imperfectly shaped but remarkably delicious piece.
The writing I produce when I sit down to write is different.
First, it is much more serious in tone. It sounds more like a commencement address and less like a conversation with a friend. It rarely has a soul to it. Second, it comes out much harder. I suspect this has something to do with the neural circuitry activated during the two modes. When I write spontaneously, I always pick up what’s fresh/on top of mind/been cooking recently, perhaps even that very morning. When I write what I’ve planned, I focus on ideas that have been in my head for a while. No wonder they take longer to retrieve and much longer to fully comprehend again. (As is the case with any project I haven’t touched for a while.)
Another reason planned writing comes out harder is psychological, and a bit of a paradox. Because these ideas have stood the test of time and are well-thought-through, I want to present them well. So, I impose on my mind another cognitive task: good presentation. This makes writing much more difficult because I’m now solving two problems instead of one. As a result, the desire to express the idea well turns out to be exactly what’s preventing me from doing it. When I write spontaneously, because the idea is literally being born as I write, I don’t and can’t yet know the goodness of it. So, I’m much more relaxed and focused on the idea itself. Perhaps that’s why spontaneous writing often ends up being more “juicy” than planned — because I’m focused on the substance rather than style, the essence rather than the trimmings.
Photography provides a good analogy. It also might be spontaneous or pre-meditated. The pre-meditated pictures can be and often are pretty good. But, again, they appear to lack something important that the spontaneous ones have in abundance: the soul. I think this soul thing might have something to do with the cognitive apparatus involved in these two modes. In the spontaneous mode, I have to act fast. This calls for S1 cognition per Kahneman (intuition/subconscious): rapid, intuitive, mostly navigated by feelings, and apparently processing much more data per unit of time. In the planned mode, S2 is more active, partly because there are other factors to consider, like style and presentation quality.
So, if good writing often comes from S1 and this means your subconscious is in the driving seat and not you, starting spontaneously might be a good trick to get to this state faster. You can always edit things later. Plus, it’s a lot more fun, not to know where you’re going. This is what keeps thinking in writing (or writing-to-think) so interesting to me after all these years. This is why I’m so hopelessly addicted to it. Every time, it’s a new road. A path not taken. And I want to take that path and see what’s around the corner, perhaps more than anything else in the world.
