What If You Don't Know Until You Write It?

For years, I thought writing was primarily about communicating something I already knew.

You have an idea, figure out what you want to say, and then find the words to express it. But some of my most important realizations have happened while I was writing.

I begin with a thought or a question, and somewhere in the writing I recognize something I couldn't articulate before. It isn't necessarily new information. Often it feels more like something I already knew but hadn't yet put into words.

This is one reason writing has become so much more than a way of communicating for me. It's also a way of discovering what's within us.

Maybe we don't always need to know exactly what we think before we begin. Sometimes we write long enough to recognize it.

Writing doesn't tell you what you know. It reveals it.

What have you discovered through writing that you didn't know you knew?

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What If You Don't Know Until You Write It?