Every Great Idea Starts With a Scribble
"People tend to sound more like themselves in chat messages than in blog posts. So perhaps write in the chat, rapidly, to a friend."
He's right. But I think the interesting question is why.
Conversation is the natural format for thinking. It's cognitively easier than writing. And I think it's easier because it's asking for less at once. When you're talking to someone, all you have to do is just come up with one sentence. The conversational format doesn't impose any structure, any standard of completeness.
A document on the other hand asks you where you are going. It implies an audience, a shape, a point you wanna convey. So before you have written a word, you're already thinking about what the whole thing is supposed to be.
In other words, the unit of conversation is the sentence. The unit of a document is the argument or the shape it's gonna take.
In a conversation, you say one thing and the next thing follows. If the first thing was wrong, you correct it in the next sentence. There is no penalty for incompleteness because incompleteness is just how conversation works. The thinking happens in that exchange itself.
And as a result, the ideas are better because you're not prematurely wasting your cognitive budget on managing the structure of what you're producing.
And it's nothing new. People who are good at writing already follow this approach intuitively. Famous writers had diaries full of draft and half-baked ideas.
A conversational UI for writing nudges you towards this approach without you noticing. You're not thinking about a document anymore. You're just saying the next thing.
And that's what Scribbles app is. It's a way to write in threads.
Writing & Editing are incompatible processes
Writing and editing are fundamentally incompatible cognitive processes.
Writing is a generative process where you are trying to let the stream of thoughts out for them to start taking some shape. And this inherently requires momentum.
Editing on the other hand, is a process that's critical by nature. You are trying to evaluate and compare something against a standard. You're trying to adjust it for an audience. And this inherently requires slowing down and taking a pause.
When you do both these things simultaneously, they cancel each other out. The generative process never gets momentum because critical mode keeps interrupting.
This is one of the reasons why blank document is so paralyzing. It asks you to produce something worthwhile. Before you've typed a word, you're already in editorial mode, pre-evaluating thoughts before they have taken shape.
The thought arrives half-formed, gets examined against an implicit standard, gets discarded and the page stays blank.
That's why the advice like "write like you're talking to a friend" is so popular. It's because you're more focused on saying things rather than editing them as you're saying them. If something is incomplete, you complete it with the next sentence.
That's what Scribbles is built for. It's a place designed for the generative half of the process. Through a conversational interface, it nudges you towards the continuation of thoughts one after the other.
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