The Pieces of Thinking
Saturday, September 7
Good morning.
Today’s excerpt is from Ted Chiang’s The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling. This part of the story features Jijingi, a teenage boy from a preliterate society, reflecting on learning written language:
As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant: writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.
Words are tools for thought. Speech, much like our internal monologue, seems to simply come from nowhere, and we often don’t know where a sentence is going until it’s already been said.
But written words we choose carefully: arranging in a particular order, pausing frequently to reflect, and eventually stepping back and evaluating. If things don’t seem right — if our writing doesn’t capture exactly what we believe — we can simply try again, rearranging things until the problem is solved.
Writing isn’t just about sharing our thoughts, but it’s about having a workplace to sort through them.