writing is how we think our way into a discipline, organize our thoughts about it and generate new ideas. - William Zinsser

Writing is thinking on paper

I like Catch-22, Gravity’s Rainbow and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for instance, because the authors of those three surrealistic novels — Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Pirsig — invented their own rules, knowing that the old ones wouldn’t do the job they had in mind.

What a good editor brings to a piece of writing is an objective eye that the writer has long since lost, and there is no end of ways in which an editor can improve a manuscript: pruning, shaping, clarifying, tidying a hundred inconsistencies of tense and pronoun and location and tone, noticing all the sentences that could be read in two different ways, dividing awkward long sentences into short ones, putting the writer back on the main road if he has strayed down a side path, building bridges where the writer has lost the reader by not paying attention to his transitions, questioning matters of judgment and taste. An editor’s hand must also be invisible. Whatever he adds in his own words shouldn’t sound like his own words; they should sound like the writer’s words.

I thought of how often the act of writing even the simplest document — a letter, for instance — had clarified my half-formed ideas. Writing and thinking and learning were the same process.