writing as thinking

It was a revelation to me when I learnt in a creative writing class that, to do creative writing, you don't have to have an idea to start with. You don't have to have any idea. You can just play with words and see what emerges. 

Writing like you think you are supposed to write is like drawing things the way you think they are supposed to look - it doesn't work. You have to forget you're drawing a cat and just draw the shapes and textures. It always seems so hard and complicated when you think that the task is to represent things accurately.

Something that stands out to me from everything I've heard writers say about the writing process, is that they don't know what's going to happen. What happens in the story is as much a surprise to the writer as it is to the reader, and it's that sense of anticipation - of wanting to know what's going to happen - that motivates the writer to write. I think this is the case for all kinds of writing - fiction and non-fiction.

If I already know exactly what I want to express in writing and the task is just to think about the best way to put it in words, that's kind of boring and uninspiring. What I write will be a kind of explanation. Good writing might have an element of that in it but I think it also needs to reflect some kind of progression on the part of the writer. Like, when you write your conclusion in an essay, for it to be good it has to really be your conclusion that you've come to through the process of writing the essay.