Writing, along with math, are two subjects that causes great stress in students and nightmares to adults. Writing and math are used to judge and rank people, so people fear them. We don't enjoy made feel incompetent, imperfect, lesser than others. So many of us will write the least that we can get away with. 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, avoid the dread that writing provokes on so many of us.
I fully understand the dread. I have felt it myself. Writing provokes a strange type of performance anxiety. Unlike karaoke or public speaking, there is no audience to judge us. We write alone. We are the performer; we are the audience. We become those teachers who marked up our printed essays. Our sentences are poor and full of mistakes. Those great thoughts that came to us while driving home become clumsy sentences expressing pedestrian ideas. Sometimes the anxiety is so strong that we can't write at all. It is called writer's block. I rather call it fear, fear of writing.
Admitting how hard writing can be, how much fear it can produce, I am still asking you to be brave: write. Write, even if the best you can do is writing poorly. Please write, because
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 problem, 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, when we begin to describe the feeling to ourselves, to name it, to find the reason for feeling that way we do, it is only then when we can begin to process it. Often just naming the emotion will make us feel better. That conversation, that exploration that we do when we put our emotions into words, that self dialogue, that is writing. 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. Our writing can be confused and disorganized. It can be vague if we struggle to express ourselves. It doesn't matter how well we do, because we can choose who we share our writing with. Most of my writing is personal, only I read it. Some I share with a few people. We can all decide what we share with others.
In reality, all of us write in ways that others will consider wrong. We misspell certain words or transpose them in sentences. We forget to agree subject and verb. After editing so much a paragraph, it no longer makes sense. Our writing reflects our family of origin and the place where we grew up. For some it means that we express themselves as small town rural people would. For others, our writing shows the vestiges of the languages that our ancestors spoke. Some of us 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 because I started reading them as comic books when I was a child. The legendary writers commit all kinds of what today we consider are writing sins. They inject their opinions. They go on long tangents telling us the history of the English language in what should be an adventure story about knights. Some write long sentences in a halting manner. Some finish setences with prepositions. Many write sentences with weird syntax and strange vocabularies. Modern writing professors would have given an F to Moby Dick. They would have demanded Shakespeare to rewrite some of his plays for rehashing tired tropes. What we admire from these writers is not their perfect adherence to a style guide, but how their works move us.
We understand how a musician has to put many hours of practice before they sound good. How an athlete must repeat the same motion hundreds of time so that when it is time to dribble a ball, it happens effortlessly. Yet the expectation for writing is that we write well immediately, magically, with no prior practice. Studying the works of aclaimed writers, we find how they wrote a lot before producing their famous works. Many writers in the 20th century were journalist; many of the legendary type, the ones who wrote with deeply personalized style. Many obsessively wrote for years in obscurity. Most of them wrote hundreds of letters. When I read books of collected essays from some of my favorite writers, some that were born as newspaper pieces, many of those essays are bad. Sometimes saved by a good joke there or there. That didn't stop them. They kept writing, because if anything else, those bad essays were practice. Bad writing is practice. Bad writing is a try or a rehearsal that leads to better writing.
Most of us are afraid to fail, especially when it comes to writing, one of the most personal of all kind of self expressions. If we sit down and write, we are confronting that fear. Writing becomes therapy. An exercise is accepting ourselves as the imperfect, flawed people that we are. With enough practice, the emotional tormoil can go away, so we focus our writing not in ourselves and our performance, but in sharing clearly with others.
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. If we are just a bit braver and share it with others, then we share ourselves with people we are about. We feel less alone.