Writing, along with math, are some of the topics that causes great stress in students ad nightmares to adults. Writing and math are used to judge and rank peopl in many countries, so people fear these subjects. We don't enjoy made feel incompetent, imperfect, lesser than others. So many of us will write the least that we can. With the emergence of large language models (LLM) chatbots like ChatGPT, we don't even have to do it at all. Many are doing just so, because the writing dread can be avoided.
I fully understand the dread. I have felt it myself. My guess is that writers' block is nothing more that this performance fear. I have read quotes from many successful, professional writers who say how painful writing is to them. It is common to fear writing.
I am asking you to be brave: write, even if you write poorly. Write poorly if that is the best that you can do. But please write.
Writing is thinking.
Thinking is how we solve problems. How we learn. How we build connections. So many times I have written a message explaining to coworkers how we can't fix a bug, only to come up with the answer as I am writing it.
Writing articulates our emotions. Articulating our emotions helps us control them.
Sometimes we feel uneasy in our bodies. It is only after we talk to ourselves where we begin to describe the feeling, name it, find the reason for feeling that way that we can begin to process it. Often just naming it will make us feel better. That conversation, that exploration that we do when we put our emotions into words, that self dialogue is writing when we type it out. Writing helps us to keep that self dialogue focused. It prevents us from being stuck in a loop where we repeat the same idea in our head. I am usually surprised at how much better I feel after I write.
Writing poorly is ok.
Our ability to think and regulate our emotions do not require talent, good spellings, or following a style guide that will make us worhty to be published in a print magazine. It can be confused or disorganized. It can be vague if we struggle to express ourseles when we were writing. It doesn't matter how well we do because we can choose who we share our writing with. Most of my writing is personal. Some of shared only with a few people. I haven't ever published anything in an important publication.
All of our writing have features that are considered wrong. We misspell certain words. We transpose words in sentences. We forget to agree subject and verb. We rewrote so much that one paragraph that when we look at again the next morning it makes no sense. Our writing reflects our family of origin, who doesn't speak like rich people. Our family may not have spoken English, so we talk with vestiges from our parents mother tongue. We have learning disabilities that make it hard for us to focus long enough to keep the same tense; to write in the same voice through our whole piece.
It doesn't matter. It has never mattered.
I like reading old literature, classics, because I started reading them as comic books when I was a child. The legendary writers commit all kinds of writing sins. They inject their opinions. They go on long tangents telling us the history of the English language. They write in a halting manner the longest sentences. Some finish setences with prepositions. Some write sentences with weird syntax and vocabulary. Modern writing professors would have given an F to Moby Dick; they would have demanded Shakespeare to rewrite some of his plays. What we admire from these writers is not their perfect command of a style guide, but how their worked moved us.
Nietzsche said that it was better to tell a bad joke than not tell a joke at all. It is the same with writing. What we gain personally from our bad drafts and poorly made verses is fully understanding our lives. Even if we fail at the task in the eyes of others, we have enriched our souls.