Thinking Before Writing

Yesterday I was supposed to post a piece of Fiction Friday, but I ended up not writing anything for it because of I got back home too late and didn’t have the mental energy to conjure up a story for that purpose. I apologise to all of those who were looking forward to it (I know of at least two people who were, so yeah). I’ll post that piece of fiction later tonight, inshaAllah.

About writing, I remember a person on twitter once tweeting something along the lines of “Most of writing is first thinking. If you write more than you think, you’re doing it wrong.” I was definitely affected by this, maybe mostly because I respect the person who tweeted it. 

I had a think about all my writing before this. My main question was: Did I think more than I wrote, or did I write more than I thought? And I’m glad to be able to answer that in almost all of my writing, I have thought more than I wrote. 

I don’t know man. For me, I can’t write without thinking. I have to have a clear thing I want to write about before I even start putting any words on the page. I have to know what I’m going to be writing, or writing about. Admittedly, sometimes, as I write, those things change. I get ideas while typing and it changes the course of the piece, and I end up surprised by how it turned out (either pleasantly or otherwise depends on the piece, really). 

But the fact remains that I can’t, or rather decide not to write anything before I have a clear idea of what I want to write, where and how my writing will go before I start putting words together to construct it. This is true for the blog lah, at least.

For the rap songs I’ve written, however, it doesn’t particularly work that way. Of course, I would prefer to have an idea before I jot down the lyrics, but in some instances, I just have a line in my head. I put that line down, and then try to rhyme it with something, then again with something else. Then by the time I have a few lines, an idea begins to show itself in the writing, then I just go with the flow and see where the piece takes me. It’s a different-ish process that I go through. I’m not complaining much, since at the end of the day, I’ve written some verses that would have otherwise not have even existed.

I’m not sure why it’s looser for me when writing songs than when writing paragraphs. Maybe the process is a bit more lenient because I’m not trying to achieve anything with my songs. I’m just simply trying to express myself in a free and creative way. When writing short stories and blogposts, I want to deliver something, be it a message or a feeling. And when that element of needing to deliver comes in it, more pressure is put on yourself to have something specific to deliver. Maybe that’s why I think a lot more before writing paragraphs than I do writing verses.

But then again I could just be talking ayam jantan. Who knows?