<small>October 19th, 2026</small> I think I am getting better at understanding my [[Writing MOC|writing process]]. I always start by **writing to think** and during this stage I write a lot. When I am writing to think, I am writing in an open ended way. I do not know what I am going to write as I am writing. I write to discover what I think about many different things. I journal my thoughts, make notes, and capture observations. I move between writing in [[Obsidian]] and writing in a notebook by hand. Sometimes I could be writing through a particular question like, "what should I be focusing on right now?" or "what is the correct structure of this film and why?" or "what exactly is media and why does it matter to humans?" The writing can be about anything really. I might write to think about the question, "what is my favourite apple pie and why?" This writing to think process is the crux of how I generate ideas and stay in the habit of writing. It often lowers my overall stress levels too when I get things out of my head. This process come natural to me. I write like this all the time. I have been thinking about how to design a writing process that works well with this dynamic. A theory I have is that only 5% of the writing I do when I am writing to think ends up getting used in a final piece. I need to validate this theory through more writing projects, but it's still a good proxy to use because it helps me understand the process I might need to go through to complete a writing project. For example, at 5%, if I want to write a 10,000 words piece, I might need to write 200,000 words. There might be more effective ways for me to approach writing projects and perhaps over time this ratio will change in some way or maybe in the future I will use a different process entirely. Now the thing I need to develop further is how I go from all this write to think material into a final piece of writing. This will involve parsing and indexing everything I wrote while thinking to understand what may or may not become part of the final piece in some way. Since when I write to think I write about many different things, looking back at my thinking could result in unexpected combinations of ideas in the final piece. ![[writing-process-black@3x (2).png]] I think I will call the step after writing to think, **Arranging**, and it's the step between writing to think and constructing a final piece where I go through and try to make sense of all the thinking I have done.