#onwriting — Public Fediverse posts

What does writing actually do to your thinking?

I’ve written a lot. Often daily on the blog since 2011, years of weekly writing for 7 for Sunday, and a daily journal that’s grown to thousands of pages. Until I started taking writing seriously, I thought writing was for capturing thoughts I already had. It turned out to be the opposite — most of what I think I think only exists once I write it down.

This thread is about what writing actually does to thinking. Not how to write, or what to write, or even why to write. Just about the strange thing that happens when you put words next to each other on a page — the ideas you didn’t know you had until they appeared, the gaps that showed up only because you tried to bridge them, the changes that happen to the mind in the act of clarification and articulation.

Writing matters
7 for Sunday — February 2025

Open with the frosted window. Alain de Botton’s image: consciousness as looking through a frosted window — your own assumptions, beliefs, patterns. Writing is the act of clearing it; you’ll never see completely, but you can clean it enough to see something true.

The writing is easy
constantine.name — July 2020

My version of the same thing: “The hard part is deciding what to share.” The cognitive work of writing — knowing what’s worth getting onto the page — is the actual practice. The hand writing or typing is the easy part.

Misunderstanding why
constantine.name — February 2025

A writer’s therapist tells her she could just stop writing. “Stop?” she says, blinking in surprise. The lesson I’m still working to internalize: the writing part doesn’t suck — what makes the work hard is also what makes it worthwhile.

What You Hear Yourself Say
Open + Curious Field Note — with Mary JL Rowe

The same insight applied to conversation. Speaking, like writing, isn’t the pipe through which understanding flows — it’s the place where understanding forms. Worth reading as the sister piece to everything else in this thread.

Two-fer from an introduction
constantine.name — September 2025

Reading as the inverse process. I noticed Will Stone’s translation of Zweig used the word bestiality in a way that didn’t seem right; took me three minutes with an LLM to confirm Zweig had written Bestialität — German for brute savagery, no modern sexual connotation. Reading carefully is just writing-in-reverse — the same attention to what words actually do.

The real fear
constantine.name — March 2025

Pressfield names the Master Fear: not failure, but fear of success — the fear that we can become the person we sense we truly are. This is why writing is hard, even many years in. The act keeps insisting that we become who we’re capable of being, and most of us it seems would rather not.

Manual labor of the mind
constantine.name — March 2025

Closing with John Gregory Dunne: “Writing is essentially donkey work, manual labor of the mind. What makes it bearable are those moments — which sometimes can last for weeks, months — when the book takes over, takes on a life of its own, goes off in unexpected directions.” That’s what writing actually does. It starts as something you’re making and becomes something that’s making you back.

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Hoping For A Productive Summer

My class ended on Wednesday with a surprise A+ on a quiz I hadn’t studied for. That was lovely. A bunch of other things happened these past few weeks, all good, which I really can’t share except to say that they were marvelous. And Dean Wesley Smith and I celebrated our 40th anniversary on Monday. […]…
https://kriswrites.com/2026/05/10/hoping-for-a-productive-summer/

#Challenges #OnWriting #challenges #workshops #writing

Hand-Write. Think Better.

A method for people who feel overwhelmed to start writing more on paper—which makes everything else easier

I’ve written a guide which shows how to use notebooks for clearer thinking: one notebook, simple practices, no elaborate systems. Written to help you stop re-thinking the same things and close open loops.

https://craigconstantine.gumroad.com/l/hand-write-think-better

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Recommended Reading List: March 2025

I had some strange experiences in my March reading. I taught a Gothic class in May, with an emphasis on Gothic romance. I loooove Gothic romance, and am not horribly fond of Gothic horror. But I chose a couple of books I hadn’t read before…and one of them! OMG! It started okay, had great…
https://kriswrites.com/2025/07/25/recommended-reading-list-march-2025/

#freenonfiction #OnWriting #RecommendedReading #Amazon #BarbaraBroccoli
@indieauthors

Business Musings: Putting Yourself Out There

I do most of my business writing on Patreon these days, but roughly once per month, I’ll put a post for free on this website. This post initially went live on my Patreon page on March 30, 2025.  If you go to Patreon, you’ll find other posts like this one. Putting Yourself Out There I’m…
https://kriswrites.com/2025/04/30/business-musings-putting-yourself-out-there/

#BusinessMusings #freenonfiction #OnWriting #Plays #Gavin
@indieauthors

Enabling possibility

I feel my title’s use of “enabling” rather than the more common [that I’ve seen] “creating” is important. (Of course, I don’t craft the titles with reckless abandon; There’d be far more, “Wordy werds” and “Completely different” type titles.) But in the past couple weeks I’ve been focused on the distinction between “to create” and “to enable.”

I’ve been sprinkling a Lonely Hearts-inspired call in a few different places as I think it’s time to bring a writer onto the Movers Mindset team. Each time I post it somewhere, it kicks off one or two conversations with someone. Each of those little conversations gives me a chance to refine how I convey my vision for this new role. (As a certain reader would say, how I convey my intention—hi Angie!)

The first thing I realized is that what I am bringing to this potential new relationship is the resources—the raw material that the team has amassed. I don’t in fact know exactly what the new person would be creating. My intention is to enable someone to create something (some things?) from that raw material. I’m not creating the possibility—it’s there already. My hope is to enable that possibility to come to fruition.

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