“Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head — even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.”
— Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw
Why do we write, you and I? Writing must strike both of us in some way if you’re reading this and I’m writing it. But why? What draws our pens to paper, our fingertips to keyboards? I’ve thought about that question a lot.
A Writing History
I’d say I’ve always been writing, but it wouldn’t be true at all, except it might be. One of my only memories from primary school is writing a story about some other boys and I slaying a giant, monstrous, spider. But I stopped for a while somewhere along the line.
It wasn’t until I was about 16 that I started again, with some helpful nudging from my mum.
Blogging was already long into it’s trailing decline as YouTube and Podcasting hit the scene. People decried the end of an era, blogging was becoming over-saturated and reduced to a bunch of marketing sites, ad-ridden hellscapes of outsourced and regurgitated content with splash promos or full screen landing pages.
But I started one anyway. People even read it.
It was, in all its glory, a crappy looking WordPress site that cost too much to maintain and was clunky to use. But I kept writing. People kept reading.
Eventually I learned enough to switch to Ghost, which had just hit public alpha, and make a theme I thought looked quirky and retro. Really it was just as crappy as, if not worse than, the initial look and took a couple less milliseconds to load.
But I enjoyed using markdown to write, I was proud that I had made it what it was, and I kept writing. Some people were actually still reading.
Eventually I hit “the dream.” Through a sheer happenstance Instagram interaction and the goodwill of a stranger, I got a gig doing copywriting work paid per-article at a decent rate for an 18-year-old who wasn’t going to university and still living at home.
And I hated it. So did the readers.
Grinding to a Halt
I couldn’t explain why at the time, but something about writing quickly lost its shine for me. it felt more like working on a factory assembly queue than expressing a creative idea.
Even my personal writings from that period were pretty lackluster.
Remember those over-saturated posts I mentioned before? Yeah, now I was the guy having to reproduce them. This wasn’t why I had started writing, and people weren’t reading these puff pieces! So I quit.
Not just the job, though that did happen first. I slowly stopped writing altogether, went from doing some form of writing or promotion everyday, to next to nothing consistently.
4 years later and I’ve had more than my fair share of attempts to start back up. But I never really found that why.
People stopped coming back eventually, and it all faded away.
Lightening Up
A lot of my story may seem jaded, and for a long time I probably was. It really wasn’t all as bad as I’ve portrayed. One thing I use to be really good at in the early days was promotion.
I had business cards and everything! Premium ones with a nice matte finish and rounded corners.
Yeah, I hated being a copywriter at a modern-day content mill, too, but the pay wasn’t that bad. It enabled me to develop my skills and pursue my other interests. There’s always a silver lining.
I managed it long enough until I got a gig as a web developer.
I wasn’t much into the entrepreneur-hustle-culture thing, either. I don’t want to be a digital nomad or a million-dollar part-time YouTuber.
I’ve never stopped wanting to write, though. It’s an itch that once I started I’ve never really been able to scratch properly. Here I am trying to do it again.
I once heard Simon Sinek give a talk on “Start With Why” which he later turned into a book I’ve never read. But it was a decent talk and I learned something from it at the time.
So let me ask that initial question again, and maybe this time I’ll find an answer.
Begging the Question
Why do we write? One of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell, gave us a few ideas with that quote at the top of this page:
Some people want to persuade you.
Other people want to give you a view inside other people’s heads.
🎼 Some of them want to use you, some of them want to be used by you. 🎵
Maybe that’s true for a lot of people. It’s probably even true for me, though not fully. As with most things, it’s a bit more complicated.
I’ve said for a long time that I’m better at writing than I am at speaking. I’ve said that because it’s true. Though usually when I say that it’s because I’m trying to weasel my way into a situation where I have the chance to learn to speak better.
But I’m starting to see that as my why. That’s why I write.
I don’t write to give other people an insight into my mind. I’m way too selfish for that, and not nearly egotistic or enlightened enough to believe for a second it would work.
But I’m also not selfish enough to say I “just” write for me. Would I put it out here for the mobs to see if I was doing it solely for myself? No.
I write because I write better than I can speak. It’s an expression thing. It’s about conversation.
I’ve always found a deep satisfaction in taking something that’s been on my mind — an idea that’s captured my attention, a passage or quote that got my brain whirring — and putting it down neatly on a page, web or analog.
I also like showing that page to other people, hearing what they think about this phrase or the piece as a whole.
I’ve experienced dopamine hits when I see someone share it somewhere and talk about a thought I was thinking better than any drug they can give you. That’s the sort of thing I write for.
The End & the Beginning
I remember in a philosophy class they talked about this idea of the dialectic, a form of reasoning and learning through discussion, and thinking that made a lot of sense to me. I write for the dialectic that ensues from the writing.
Maybe that’s not why you write, which is fine. But that’s my why.
Knowing that, I think it’s time I gave this thing another shot! Stay tuned.