Staring at a blank page and wondering what drives the urge to write. Also, since most writers talk inordinately about writing itself, I am wondering whether the urge comes from the act itself. The more we write, the more urgent it becomes to get back to writing. This could be because you start using writing as a prop to stand up what you are thinking. Does writing reduce your ability to think without it? I would hope not, but something tells me that this could be the case. And if it is so, is this necessarily wrong? Is this an addiction wrapped around a healthy habit?
A similar urge can be found with other aspects of human cognition too I suppose. Some think by talking to others, some by retiring to one’s thoughts and dreams, others think by the tools of their trade e.g., investors think about life in general through the framework of investing itself. It’s not surprising that the more you indulge in the activity, the more the activity drives your thinking. It’s probably same as the saying that initially you shape your tools, and then the tools shape you.
I guess every medium has its constraints. Not everything, for instance, can be neatly organized in sentences; no matter how proficient you are. Sure, there are masters of writing that have an amazing grasp of the right words, the right construction, the right metaphor, to use for describing the reality as they see it. But, as any writer would confess, sometimes the writing takes the reins in its own hands. We point to our sub-conscious when that happens. But this sub-conscious is reliant on the rules of writing and that requires a translation, from the sub-conscious thoughts to the words on the page. Somethings get lost in translation, but, as with translated works, many things get added on too. I guess the religious scriptures that are ancient have been translated so much that it’s hard to distinguish what was the original and where interpretations and translations seeped in.
I have found that writing can be immensely helpful as a therapeutic exercise because it lets me tame the wild surge happening inside of me. This is even as what I write may be completely detached from what I am experiencing or feeling at the moment. In this, writing becomes an escapist mechanism. Nothing wrong with it, but if Tolkien is to be believed, every escapist mechanism requires a terror, a demon. This is so that we can get out of this world and not get stuck forever. What’s the terror with writing as an escapism? I suppose it’s the dreaded writer’s-block, isn’t it? That, along with the desire to be a perfect craftsman of writing can spell doom to whatever pleasure this activity can provide to the restless mind. Sure, you can leverage topoi to start somewhere, even if formulaic, but in the end, you need to rely on a spark of creativity or understanding that may not land beyond the progymnasmata.
I have started on the a-million-words journey (this blog chain) to practice writing as a structured exercise. But often, I find myself wondering whether the exercise is valuable or whether there is an opportunity cost involved with writing without method or without a firm goal in mind. If I were to use this platform to write about a specific topic for instance, then surely a hundred thousand words of it would give me enough grasp of the topic to be a nuisance. Instead, I rely on ad-hoc topics and whatever jumps out in a stream of consciousness way to write. The result is that the outputs are vagaries of nature as opposed to a single, coherent thesis on things I care about and want to learn about.
But writing isn’t a linear exercise. Good writing, from the authors I care to read, often comes from a meandering journey to the heart of the matter. What gets passed on to us in the form of finished products though, is not the meandering journey but the compressed version. This compressed version astounds us because the lazy, roundabout path that the author took with his learning and his thoughts got condensed subsequently and the result became a product with an inordinately high insight density. So, writing can be goal less too, as long as we are getting better at the mechanics of it and freeing ourselves up to the ideas themselves behind the writing.
The sheer number of newsletters, podcasts, books, articles, blogs, etc. that are created in this world of ours is astounding. Amidst this volume of content, the platforms of today don the role of filtering, selecting, curating, and presenting the content that their algorithms feel are the most engaging. While in themselves they are incredibly varied, the content we get exposed to are still passing through this invisible filter which makes me wonder what would happen if the internet today were to be a better, unbiased aggregator than what we get today. What would take look like? I am guessing the scaling challenges would need to be addressed via a mechanism other than the algorithms. Maybe peer-supported, maybe counterfactuals, maybe better interactions with the filters.
There’s an abundance of ideas, of thought experiments, of concepts, of theories in this increasingly connected world of ours. Much more so than has existed since like ever. To write better, we need to learn the art of collecting ideas better versus drowning in a sea of ideas. Not all ideas are created equal and despite a goal-less exercise, only some ideas can stimulate writing because we can associate with it.
Should we contribute to the deluge of content by also writing in public? I would posit that it’s not just useful but also essential for learning to write. Writing in private can be good for some types of ideas, but for most self-expanding ideas, the greater the feedback loops we can create, the more our ideas will be tested and pruned and compressed. And what better way to do that than to write in public!
Jargogled Impressions. 