Why Do I Write At All?

I'm being far too "meta" with this blog I suppose. Instead of just getting down to the business of writing, I spend my time writing about the business of writing. But then again a blog is by its nature very self-indulgent so can I really be blamed?

I just got done reading a great and sad review of David Foster Wallace's life in The New Yorker and I was compelled to write about one particular topic that as a graduate student I have thought about many, many times, and that seemed to be the constant motif of Wallace's somewhat tortured life: how utterly dreadful the process of writing can be. Of course there are moments when you are inspired and then it is like you are floating with ease and the words can actually pour from your fingertips in full and already-revised sentences, but those moments are by far the minority. Most of the time writing raw text is more akin to being asked really boring questions by well-meaning strangers. It's not enjoyable, you don't want to be doing it after a few minutes, and your mind constantly wanders to other topics. Writing while online, as most of us now do, is particularly dangerous in this regard because it takes just a click and you are on the endless joyride of YouTube or Slate or primitivism.com. So this leads naturally to two questions: Why is writing so torturous, and why do I nevertheless keep on writing?


1. Why is writing so unenjoyable?
David Foster Wallace described writing one of his novels as "trying to carry a sheet of plywood in a windstorm" and despaired to a friend that the only way to produce a readable book was to write thousands of pages and then throw out 90% of them, "the very idea of which makes something in me wither." It's actually somewhat comforting to hear that a writer as gifted as Wallace felt pretty similarly to me about the act of writing. Putting pen to paper seems so simple. . . Why is it so often dreaded and dreadful?

It's actually ridiculous of me to even ask this question, because it has surely been asked and answered in some form hundreds of time by esteemed writers and what would I know that they haven't already figured out? Still, I'll offer a few observations. First there is a really obvious reason that I don't wish to spend much time on: writing is not fun because writing is hard. Few human brains are equipped without extensive training to take the teeming cluster of ideas, observations, memories, and fragments of ideas, observations, and memories that constantly swirl through the cerebrum and turn them in one take into a single, noncircuitous piece that flows forth and tells a decent story. You might eventually pull it off, but it will emerge after multiple drafts, yawns, stops and starts, tangents that go nowhere, and some seriously poor sentences. Just the mere act of writing a passage only to come to the last word and have to pause as it escapes you is such an inherently frustrating experience. So writing is hard.

But there's a more interesting reason why, at least in my case. Writing is not just hard, it also seems so worthless. It does not produce anything of substance, it only configures and records human thought, which is just one breath in the endless universe of breaths. If like me you have some other activity or hobby that involves the production of some tangible product through manual labor (mine's gardening), you know the complete sense of satisfaction at having actually created a worthwhile object, a product of use and even necessity to humans. And how does writing stand in comparison? Oh sure, it has the potential to stimulate the mind and all that, but who is so foolish as to think that their own writing is among the 0.001% of all writing that actually stands as the substantive, important, and lasting expression of a human idea? A carrot pulled from my garden soil, on the other hand, has the same value of sustenance as any carrot pulled from any soil by anyone, and it is something I helped create with the work of my hands, not my metacognition. So writing for me is such a debilitating task because at some deep and subconscious part of my being I recognize that it is a task with no inherent worth, a task that produces nothing of inherent importance, a task whose end product might be read by 1 or 1,000,000 readers but in either case will soon vanish into the ether. Even if your writing actually inspires people and "makes a difference" you are left with the sickly feeling that you have conjured up something phony, a simulacrum of the actual act of production, and yet you are being rewarded and lauded for your phoniness.*


2. Why do I continue to write?
So given this state of affairs, why do people like me continue to return again and again to the disdainful act? After all, I don't continue to poke myself with sewing needles after having done it once as a child. I don't continue to make myself pass out after trying it in junior high. Again there is at least one superficial reason and at least one more hidden reason. The easy answer is that I continue to write because although the process of writing is tormenting, the end product produces a feeling of glee and accomplishment, delusional though it may be. It is akin to a drug high. It causes the release of some addictive hormone that makes me want to come back for more, ignoring the painful process that led me to the high in the first place. I must admit, for all the sourness of this essay, that when I behold the final draft, or sometimes even the first draft, of a paper I have written I am bathed in pride and I want others to read it to see how clever I am. Why do I blog, after all? So I come back to writing even after it makes me cuss for the same reason I come back to exercising even after it does the same thing: after the cussing, it actually makes me feel good.

But there is another reason, a little less optimistic: I return to writing because it is such an ego-driven act, and we are at heart phenomenally ego-driven beings. Writing is an expression of the self as self-important, the expression of one's ideas as idea-worthy. Again, I would say this has more to do with beholding the end product of one's writing than with the actual act, but my point is that it is more than a visceral, endorphin-ridden thrill. It is an egotistical thrill, and what greater thrill is there? We are a culture in love with ideas, enamored of originality, enthralled with the intellect (except for Sarah Palin). If I, then, am a producer of original, intellectual ideas, what does this say about my worth as a human being? What does it say about the power of my brain? My writing is an expression of me, and if it is enshrined in a journal or a book or a blog then I am enshrined as well. I have crossed over into that vaunted realm of being someone important.

So stay tuned for my next blog posting, because God knows I'm going to write one.


* There is a key phrase in the preamble that may have slipped by without notice, and that is "graduate student." When I speak of my writing I am speaking in large part about academic writing, because that is what I spend my days doing. So it is possible, simply to note here as a caveat, that I may have my target incorrectly mounted. In critiquing the act of writing it's possible that what I really mean to be doing is critiquing the act of academic writing, or perhaps even the edifice of academia itself. Certainly as a repository of written works with no worth to humankind it is unparalleled.

Why I Don't Write More, and Why I Should

Among all the various ways you can slice people into categories, I would describe myself as a person who comes up with a lot of ideas. Not ideas in the sense of material inventions, but in the sense of intellectual embellishments -- the kind batted around so frequently in the echo chamber of the blogosphere. And I am in the ranks of the highly educated, and I am an academic in training, and I am intellectually narcissistic, and so I often think that my ideas are essay-worthy, or at least blog-worthy. I would say that such ideas -- what I would consider to be, as a minimal criterion, the seeds of an interesting discussion -- occur to me at least once every few days. In fact, there is a drawer in my desk that contains multiple sheaves of papers with essay ideas scribbled down hastily during a dinner party or late at night as I try to go to sleep. And I do, in fact, have a blog dedicated solely to the purpose of exercising this writing faculty. So why do so few of my ideas end up there? Why have I actually written up such a tiny fraction of them? Why have I posted a grand total of six blog entries in the almost full year that my blog has been live?

There are a number of reasons, a perceived lack of time of course being one. But I somehow find the time to fiddle away on Facebook and The Onion, so that's a pretty flimsy excuse. A far stronger reason is something more deeply psychological: one of the things that most consistently hampers my ability to express an idea in essay form is the persistent fear that the idea has already been expressed by someone else. This thought I've had seems exciting and fresh at first, but upon further reflection it seems that surely someone else out there has already thought it, written it up, and published it in some medium. My own attempt would therefore be redundant, banal, unoriginal -- and in the world of intellectual discourse few fates are more discouraging.

But this mentality is clearly very counterproductive, as it stymies the very act that the blog is supposed to cultivate: intellectual expression, engagement, and development. So in order to kick myself out of this rut and perhaps appeal to others who suffer from the same predicament, I am going to offer the following reasons for why this fear of redundancy is stupid:

(1) Even if someone else has thought of the same idea as me and published it online or in print, it's still a worthy endeavor from the point of view of my own intellectual journey. It still represents a stage in the ever-evolving path of my own grappling with theories and theorists and all the intellectual back and forth that makes being an engaged citizen of these times so exciting. And this seems especially important to point out in the context of blogging, as opposed to publication in the print media: blogs are all about self-expression and the development of one's personal, subjective discourse, so one should feel absolutely free to engage in ideas no matter how facile or picked over.

(2) Leading from this last statement, it is a truism that the blogosphere is already chock full of repeated statements and redundant ideas. Go and find 10 substantive blog entries on any topic of your choice -- the banking crisis, gay marriage, sustainable development -- and you will find multiple repetitions. Blogging is not a peer-reviewed activity, nor should it be. The multiple iterations of ideas is actually a strength of the form, because it is through these iterations that we fine-tune ideas and hone theories, cut out the fat and get straight to the heart of a topic. Blogging, at least of the substantive variety, is the crowd's (or, to use more up-to-date lingo, the cloud's) way of brainstorming. So why not add to the effort?

(3) Furthermore, not all people out there get their intellectual thrills from the same sources, particularly when we're talking about internet sources, so it's perfectly fine to have the same basic idea expressed multiple times in multiple forums. It increases the chance that the idea will actually be heard and chewed on. So be redundant -- you are actually helping the cause.

(4) In fact, it lends more credence to an idea when it is expressed many times over by multiple parties. Imagine how weak the argument for sustainable agriculture would be if every commentator who wanted to express his support of it decided that Michael Pollan had already made his points for him, so there was no reason to second them. No, ideas need multiple expressions in order to pile on the weight of respectability. Michael Pollan may be a hell of a writer, but if he was the only one making the case for sustainable food systems we'd be in trouble. Blogging is akin to intellectual voting, and God knows we need more voters, not less.

(5) To return to the self-centered perspective of point #1, it is important to see blogged ideas not as fully-formed, comprehensive essays but merely as seeds. You are sowing intellectual seeds, some of which will come to fruition and some of which won't; some of which will be picked up by others and many of which will not; some of which you may return to at a later date and cultivate into a proper essay and some of which you need not bother. This is about development and refinement, not instantaneous perfection.

(6) Finally, this fear of redundancy is just a manifestation of a much deeper fear, that of being judged. When you write up an idea and post it for the whole world to take in (ok, that is perhaps being a bit optimistic about my readership) you have instantaneously put your thoughts, your work, indeed yourself out there to be assessed. What if people don't like it? What if people find it shallow, silly, obvious, or just plain wrong? How can I deal with that shame? But here again we encounter a hurdle over which one simply has to leap. Do not tens of thousands of people face this challenge every day in the world of blogs and journals and books? Is this not in fact a very healthy predicament that promotes a thick skin and a detachment from the opinions of others? And do not other peoples' judgements actually help fuel the very creative process that is the ultimate goal here? Is this most ephemeral of phenomena -- what other people think of me -- really going to stop me from the act of writing that I have been dreaming for all the years that I've been shoving scribbled essay notes into a drawer?

So blog on you wuss, and feel no shame.