Why I write Part 1

I haven’t been asked about this, but I feel the need to explain the reasons why I write. I don’t know why, maybe it is just me trying to understand it myself. Regardless I spent the last week thinking about it and I came up with several reasons that I split into two different categories, personal and career. This article explains the first of those categories.

To Find Understanding

The act of writing about a subject forces you to understand. To break down that complicated issue until it makes sense to you, then reconstruct that material into an argument that makes sense to both you and the reader; all in a way that is hopefully interesting and entertaining (or at least one of the two). It’s the same reason why teaching a subject helps reinforce concepts learned in school, or why coaching makes you better understand the sport.

Let me try by using that same principle in an example. I am currently writing an article about career politicians. The process started with me learning; researching, pulling together news articles and research papers, and a tracking down few book quotes that I had read previously. I took all this information and diagramed it, made connections, dispelled claims I believed false or weak, and tried to form a structure of something that logically follows. This required critical thinking, evaluating arguments on strength and logical reasoning, all while keeping how another perspective will perceive this in mind. Then I try to write it; thinking about flow, word choice, whether or not it’s interesting (is this sentence even interesting?) trying to craft a piece that is easily digestible. When you are this deep in the material, it becomes ingrained in your brain, and the act of writing, editing, re-writing, and then re-editing only reinforces this thinking even more. When the article is finished, I will come away with an understanding of the problem that will last for some time.

To Create

The world has become too big and too complicated. We are constantly overwhelmed by the hours of content available to us, by the sensationalized 24-hour media and the always-on social media networks. One could easily spend their entire day simply consuming on the internet, watching YouTube videos, and scrolling through Tik-Tok until it’s dark again and time to go asleep. 

Creating takes back a little bit of our agency. Instead of looking back on a day of Tik-Tok dances or bullshitting my boss, I can say “hey, I made this. I built it by my own decisions, for my own sake, and I feel better because of it.”

During the beginning of the pandemic especially, when the world seemed more out of control than usual, writing provided me a sense of satisfaction and purpose not found when I was at school or the various bullshit jobs I’ve had. I think that one could say the same about any craft, from coding and carpentry to painting and paving. To look back on the day and see tangible evidence of something done well...well, that’s becoming an increasingly rare privilege.

Finally...To Express Myself

I feel like finding a way to truly express oneself is a problem that all people deal with in different degrees of intensity. It’s the feeling of walking away from a conversation disappointed and unsatisfied with yourself, never quite feeling that you conveyed what you wanted to convey. That your message was misconstrued, scrambled, lost, or worse, was so boring that the receiver could care less. 

I have known people who could express themselves with ease. The people who could tell a story that would leave you laughing with stitches, who could sell water to the ocean and leave the ocean thinking she got away with a good deal. These are the people I look up to. 

On the other end, I know people that, whether they know it or not, struggle with this. The people who hold back from the conversation because they can’t find the best way to contribute, or the poor people who say something with a hundred words that could have been said with ten. While I sympathize with these people, I am afraid to be one.

We humans are social creatures. We crave connection and relationships and community. We want to relate to these people, to hear their stories, and return the favor with our own. This is only possible by truly expressing ourselves, how we are feeling, what we are thinking, and in this modern age it’s one of the hardest things for our species to do sincerely. 

As I’ve hinted, I think I lean more towards those who struggle with this. I’ve always been a quieter kid, especially relative to my boisterous Italian family. I rarely participated in school, shared only when asked at the dinner table. I decided to choose quiet over being the person who overly chatted.

Writing is my way of improving that. Both by using another medium, one where I can clarify and edit my message before sharing, but also in the action of doing so, improve my speech thereafter. Neil deGrasse Tyson once said that hardly any sentence that comes out of his mouth does so unless he had written it down sometime before. Love him or not, Neil is known to be a great communicator, and I want to do the same. I want my conversation to begin to sound like the words and ideas I have spent so much time crafting and editing. If I do this enough, eventually they will seep into my consciousness, and hopefully when I talk after.

Part 2 of this two-part series will be released tomorrow. Want to get all my writing in one, easily ignored email every Sunday ? Want to help support the growth of this site. Consider joining the hundred-plus others that are subscribed to my newsletter below!