One of my favorite ideas is that writing doesn’t have to start with writing. I’m a huge fan of the oral-to-written process, especially if you find yourself with blank screen freeze.
Let’s say you had a great idea during a meeting and you did what I’ve been advocating and added it to your writing backlog. But then you sit down to write about it and you can’t quite remember why it captured your attention.
Let’s say you gave a slide talk at a conference and afterward people crowd around you talking excitedly about your ideas. There are great ideas flying around, but there’s no way to capture them and by the time you fly home, you can’t remember all of them.
In these cases it may be hard to drop straight into writing. Try using thought partnering as a way to kickstart your writing practice. The point is to do an end-run around the blank screen and straight into a first draft. I recommend using Otter.ai to record and transcribe your conversations or having your thought partner take notes.
Thought Partnering
Find a friend, family member, or colleague and take turns giving each other the gift of 30 minutes of questions and undivided attention. Give them a list of questions you’d like to be asked. Here are some of my favorites.
What’s interesting about that? (this is one of the most important questions you can be asked. Have the questioner keep asking some version of this).
Why is this useful/important?
What are the implications?
What is the problem as you see it?
How would you fix that?
If you’re talking to a subject matter expert, you can also ask for information specific to your space.
“I’m starting to write about X. What ideas would you want to see included in a piece on this?”
“What comes to your mind when you think about X?”
“Who do you think would be interested in X?”
“I have been reading a lot about X. Here’s what I’ve heard. Does that mesh with what you’ve been hearing/reading?”
Why Thought Partnering works
Writing has a bad rap as a lonely activity. But all writing is dialectical, meaning it takes two to make meaning. Writing is a response to an imagined audience. The problem is that it’s not always easy to stimulate that response on our own. But when we put an audience in front of us that is asking us specific questions, it’s hard not to respond. So thought partnering harnesses our natural conversational impulses.
But it’s also powerful to hear ourselves think out loud. Thoughts clarify themselves as we speak. It’s equally powerful to be witnessed and supported in that thought process. Having someone just say, “yeah, tell me more…” is an amazing technology.