Writing plays a highly visible and important role in your PhD: your papers communicate your research to the community, and your dissertation communicates your thesis to your committee. This talk is about the less visible, but equally important, role that writing plays in your development as an independent researcher. My claim is that writing is how you learn to recognize, answer, and ask interesting questions. I’ll illustrate this with three concrete practices: writing to actively read a paper (to recognize which questions are interesting), writing to structure a project (to answer them), and writing to get better advice from your advisor (to learn to ask your own). In all three cases, the writing is targeted towards an audience of one– yourself.