Your Brain is a Pot of Coffee

I’m often either thinking of or revisiting ideas I believe hold real promise and don’t get started on them, telling myself, This needs to percolate for a while. That happened at the beginning of this week, and the follow-up thought was: I need to write on the blog about how a writer’s brain is like a pot of coffee.

The more I mull over this analogy, the more I find it an apt description. I also believe it’s a way to describe all writers, which isn’t something I like to do. Lump everyone together, that is. There’s, wonderfully, so much individuality to how, what, and why we write, but we are all the process of making coffee, our brains the pot.

We can’t start with that image of the receptacle, though. The process begins before a machine, the French press, whatever tool you prefer, comes into play. We begin with beans.

You’ve surely connected the dot that “beans” equal “ideas” in this analogy. I’d like to broaden that beyond ideas for a story. “Beans” must mean “knowledge.” Because it’s not enough to have a genius plot or premise on your hands; you must know what to do with such a thing.

In a way, then, you’ve been collecting beans to make your cup of coffee since you first started learning language and how to make it function grammatically. Knowing where to put punctuation when writing dialogue? A bean. Wielding a semicolon or em-dash correctly? Bean. Every nit-picky, tedious, sometimes contradictory grammar rule is a bean.

The mechanics of how sentences are structured and work may not be glamorous or seem as important as the story itself, but think about the last time you read something that had no paragraph breaks. That had sparse punctuation. That had sentences running together like an out of breath second grader. Made the reading experience work, right, instead of leisure?

Beans of “knowledge” also consist of preliminary research you do for a project. Books within your genre, articles about your niche subject, fieldtrips for the purpose of observation—all of this factors into the first part of the coffee (i.e. writing) process.

Let’s say you have enough beans to get brewing. You’re ready to grind them up, put them in the filter, pour the water, and press the button. That’s good. That’s an exciting time.

Yet, the coffee’s not ready immediately. Your brain, remember, isn’t the machine as a whole. It’s the pot, which, up to now, has been empty. And, though you have gathered information and inspiration, the pot doesn’t fill up on those things all at once.

We’ve arrived at the phase I’m often telling myself to dwell in a bit longer: the percolating.

There’s absolutely such a thing as sitting too long without writing because you’re in your head about whether or not you can write well or you make excuses for not making time for your story, but this isn’t that. This is knowing yourself and your story well enough to understand when you have enough of the pieces to finally begin.

You wonder now, But, if I have my knowledge beans, what more do I need?

I’m glad you asked. I’ll use my in-progress pirate tales as an example.

The central idea/conflict for my tales came to me literal years ago. Like, 2021 or something. I didn’t start writing them, in earnest, until late 2024. I had to think of the POV that made sense, who ought to be my narrator. I had to dedicate time to building up who my central characters, Aster and Atlas, were. Their personalities and how they viewed the world and what they were going to be like as captains of their distinct vessels. They’re siblings, so I had to understand their family, those dynamics, even if only a smidge of it ends up in the story.

These things are different from historical research on pirate ships from the 17th century. Different from taking notes on the various roles and offices aboard a ship. This percolating is where the initial idea and the research come together to reveal, ah, okay, here’s how I might begin this tale.

I say begin, too, because I doubt any write can crank out a full story on just one, metaphorical pot of coffee.

I think of it like this: this first pot can be poured out to fill a certain number of cups, that translates to a finite number of writing sessions, and then it’s time to refill the pot. It’s time to replenish your brain.

The nice thing is, at this point, you have some of the same beans as before because you didn’t need to go out and relearn the basics of grammar and how to write. But maybe your first few sessions/chapters revealed you need to do new research on a topic you hadn’t realized you needed to know something about until the story told you so. For me, it meant I was trying to get a better idea of constellations and cartography in the real world so I could better understand how to put a fantastical twist on them in my storyworld.

It might not be research, either. It might be pausing so you can make a rough sketch of a map for your world. It might mean making a flow chart of checks and balances for your magic system, plainly writing out the rules so you can see loopholes or inconsistencies. It could be making a family tree. It could be simply taking a rest day, and your new beans are refreshed energy that give you renewed motivation for your story.

It’s these step-by-step pieces, when we focus in on them, that makes this broad metaphor encompass the collective group of writers. Your beans will look different from mine, how you go about gathering them will be different, and what you do with them will be, too. Even for one writer, given the project, the process will vary. How is it that my pirate tales required years of percolating yet a second project (that I can’t say much about at the moment for personal plotting reasons) I started at the beginning of the year only needed a few months? I’ve written short stories that seemed to pour out of my head in the span of one twenty-four hours, and then there are others that took me whole semesters.

Sometimes I can tell when I need to let things brew a while longer, and there are other times it takes sitting down to write and hitting a wall three days in a row before I go, Huh, I guess I need to do more thinking on this first…

I don’t always enjoy the percolating because it can feel like I’m wasting time. That I’m not doing the work. The lesson I’ve learned, though, is that, when I try to force myself through that piece of the process, my story suffers for it. The words come slower, sound off and stilted. I’ll spend more time staring at a blank page getting frustrated than anything productive.

In those instances, what I ought to do is take a step back. Be patient. I don’t try to pour my cup of coffee while the machine’s still doing its bit, do I? Why should I try to interrupt or hurry along the mental percolation then?

We all, as creatives, have to know that we are not the bottomless pot of coffee. We, inevitably, run out of steam, and I’m not talking about experiencing burn-out. I just mean normal fatigue at the end of the day or week. The kind of tired that’s resolved by having regular breaks built into your routine. The kind of tired that can be helped by a good meal, a lovely phone call with a friend, a walk around your neighborhood, a book you can get lost in—whatever simple yet meaningful thing gives you life.

My intent in drawing out this analogy is to help you give life back to your projects. Sometimes you have to think in different terms to see a little clearer and to know what part of the process you’re at. You may think you’re ready to start pouring out to fill up a cup with coffee, but you may not fully realize it’s still time to be gathering beans. Or you can be like me: realizing you have the beans yet need to let them brew. 

Each step is necessary, too, and I hope that’s as obvious to you as it is to me. You do not get a satisfying end result by skipping out on any of the pieces that come before. What you end up putting down on a page is going to be stronger for the time you take researching, developing your technical craft, and mulling over the information you’ve collected. 

As I wrap up my thoughts, I’d encourage you to journal whatever your response is to this analogy. Write about how you treat your process, if you honor each step or if there’s one you rush or try to gloss over. You could write, too, about how you’ve seen yourself grow and adapt to being better in giving each part its due. 

And then put your beans to work, my friend. Brew some coffee. Pour it out and see what kind of words are waiting to be shared with the world today.