My Writing Process: Reflections on Writing and Ideas

9 min readApr 1, 2022

By: Charlie Lincoln

I’ve been thinking about the writing process a lot lately and how I’ve been evolving and thinking about writing lately. It’s definitely a process and a lot of it has been building upon itself. For example, I have revisited politics of the English language by George Orwell.

Several times throughout my life and every time I revisited it's sort of a revisit to something that used to be right now is. I don’t know if that necessarily makes sense but I’ll try to explain.

Step 1:

Nowadays I’ve been envisioning the writing process of something that I’ve been building up to. For example, I try to write to people on a regular basis I’m constantly riding long emails because I feel like that is a type of training even though it’s not very serious and I don’t necessarily need reflect too much and I don’t need to edit even that much but I do try to give it my best effort so I’m constantly riding in terms of emails.

Step 2:

Then the next step would be writing blog posts and personal journal entries which I also do frequently. Maybe the journal entries are also on the same level as the first level of writing emails but sometimes I think they take a little bit more reflection and I do edit them to a certain degree depending on the situation.

Now I would say there’s another level that isn’t necessarily the third level just yet but it’s supplements all the other levels and that is the more creative type of writing such as writing poetry. I like to write poetry because even though it’s not necessarily the expository writing that I’m doing in terms of nonfiction publishing, it does help as a sort of gymnastic to get my mind moving and it also expresses a deep sincere feeling within me. There was a college student who once asked me what advice I had for reading and writing. For the writing portion, I would say you have to be sincerely respectful to your audience and that can mean learning the punctuation and grammar that they appreciate which can be different for different audiences. And the second piece of advice in addition to respect is speaking from the heart that is speaking the truth as you know it as you’ve experienced it and as you sincerely feel and logically think it to be.

Brainstorming

Then the next step in writing is also brainstorming. But I don’t think it’s necessarily just yet the third step it’s just something that’s on there and that’s keeping a journal or some sort of list of ideas. And included in that is the outlining process but that’s what it takes me to step three.

Step 3:

Step three is more along the lines of what you can do when you finally have some ideas that are starting to coalesce together. That is to say, starting to write drafts and seeing a syllogistic argument, especially in expository writing, and starting to put the logic together.

Step three is more along the lines of what you can do when you finally have some ideas that are starting to coalesce together. That is to say starting to write drafts and seeing a syllogistic argument, especially in expository writing, and starting to put the logic together.

Reading and Research

I would say another one of these things that’s sort of underline all of these steps is, of course, the reading and research process which can gum in many different forms such as watching documentaries or reading books, or listening to podcasts. It could also involve conversations with people. So it’s the reading and research and collecting of information I would be wouldn’t say it’s necessarily similar to say Sir Francis Bacon's system of getting data and organizing it. Moreover, I would just say it’s inductive reasoning but they do have both Bacon’s system and the inductive reasoning system intertwined. But you also might want to add an Aristotle system in terms of deductive logic in the prior and posterior analytics. Deep down I think there’s something to be said for phenomenological investigations such as Hegelian dialectics and Kantian synthetic a priori. But that is more a reflection of what is necessarily going on.

Another thing that I’ve noticed is that at certain times of the day people can be more creative and more thoughtful. This might have to do something with the circadian rhythm that people have. But I also think it’s important to have the ability to fish for big ideas and the same way that David Lynch would say that you fish for big ideas. It may not necessarily be meditation but it’s something along the lines of understanding what part of the day that you’re most creative I’ve noticed lately that I’ve been very creative or at least have the energy to right around 11 AM to 12 AM but it’s not always that and I think that goes to having a regular schedule which is something that David Lynch or just people to have granted the timeframe could change depending on what time your regular schedule is functioning on. I also noticed that prior to sleep or sometimes during the night may be due to the dream and subconscious state of my mind, I can pick up interesting ideas and sometimes I wake up and write them down. But similar to William James interpreting Hegel’s systematic thought, it’s not always things that end up being something necessary for expository writing. But they could relate to the poetic and poetry stage of doing things.

Finally, I would say the next step is the law review process in writing in a more publishable way in a way that will be grammatically appropriate for the audience as well as well researched with proper citations and things like that. That is a whole other level and system that is very complicated in terms of dealing with all reviews and submitting to lol reviews and working from there. But it’s something that I’ve been trying to focus on for the better half of this past decade.

So I would say that is sort of the next ultimate step. It’s the lower view process and creating an expository article that is very super deep and profound. In that realm of things, I would also consider articles published for journals that aren’t necessarily academic but are sort of practice I think it’s a very similar process although the editing in my experience has not been as intense from the law of an editor side when for example you publish for a technical journal but that’s not always the case and I have more limited experience with respect to that. I’m thinking about my publications with the American Bar Association‘s tax section and with the professional publication called TaxNotes.

Finally, I feel like this all sort of culminates in a way with the publication process of a book because it is the synthesis of a lot of ideas that I’ve been working on for years and really over a decade and some cents. A lot of these ideas that come up in portions of the chapters of the book that I wrote more things that I was thinking about even in high school and started to for men and put together in college and law school and even in one of the LLM programs I attended.

Now that is sort of the ultimate synthesis of things that I’ve been working on and I feel very blessed and very happy and thankful that I was able to go through that process because I think it is a self-fulfilling process. If you read the book Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, she says to the young poet that you need to write and you should only do it if you absolutely feel the need in your soul to write. And that’s something that I deeply feel it’s something that I feel that I must do that no matter given what situation I was in the life I feel like that is what I’m trying to do it’s an artistic output but at the same time expository writing is not necessarily artistic. But it’s near from the deepest wellsprings of my being that I feel like a calling to write and to be a writer. A writer writes. Whether it’s with a crayon or whether it’s with on a computer or something like that. And this is something that is deeply in bedded in me and has been something that I have enjoyed. I think it goes to my deep love of language and linguistics not only from a filly logical perspective or necessarily anthropological perspective although I think those sort of contributing to it. I think it’s something deeper in terms of a humanistic aspect of how we communicate with each other whether it’s with a spoken word or whether it’s with the written word.

I’m hoping that I can combine a lot of these steps that I’ve been synthesizing and putting together in my head for the Ph.D. that I’m currently working on because I think that will lead to something beautiful and something that I’ve sincerely been working on for a while as well. Indeed a lot of the ideas in the Ph.D. that I’m working on were things that I was thinking about in high school with respect to the commerce clause and I even wrote an essay and sort of have been familiar with these cases in case law rules sense either late middle school early high school with respect to the United States Constitution and it’s interesting to combine those with the technical aspects of taxation but also the theoretical aspects of taxation.

I hope to build on this process of a four-step process that is (1) the first step is writing with people, (1) the second step is writing on the blog and maybe journal entries, (3)the third step is law review articles and goals, and (4) the fourth step is a book. But all of these are supplemented by other steps that include the brainstorming process the reading and research process, and the poetic process. Likewise, I think all of these come from the deep wellsprings of my soul and I sincerely believe that.

Motivation and Psychology Behind Motivation:

I want to add something else that isn’t necessarily a step but it’s sort of a psychological dynamic and it might be similar to the types of day and the times of day that people are good at being creative and doing things like that.

I don’t know exactly what this is but I’ve seen it also present and other people. I think it’s different from procrastination but I think it’s similar in respect to the effects it has on the other thing that you need to do.

So I’ve noticed other people and also myself whenever you need to do something specific sometimes you can find a lot of pleasure in it quickly within time constraints but also I found that you can procrastinate on the thing that you need to do and also be very effective that doing the thing that you don’t necessarily need to do at that moment suits this idea that you can do something that you don’t necessarily need to do and it’s sort of holding off on that and the creative juices and energy come up for the other thing that you need to do. I know this is very abstract.

For example, once I was going to hang out with a friend and the friend had a riding streak when he knew that we definitely wanted to hang out and want to finish up as quickly as possible. That might be the nature of procrastination.

Likewise, I’ve noticed that if I have an impending deadline I can be very efficient at trying to get that done as quickly as possible you may not always be the best result but it does seem to produce the creative urges and the grade of impulse.

But then there is another thing that’s different from the procrastination deadline it’s the idea that you need to do something specific but you ultimately end up getting energy for something else and in that sense, it may be a type of procrastination but it’s this ultimate form of needing to do things. It’s hard to artificially construct such situations. But I think it can be done that the screen ultimately leads to a really beautiful system of creativity.

I wonder what other people think about the system.