Write and Wrong

Why you shouldn't write? (should write?)

Notes from a class I taught at WARP.

Caveat: refers to personal, introspective, narrative writing. I expect 0-70% of this post will be relevant for any given person. I would be extremely surprised if all of it applied to anyone. (Not all of it applies to me.)

I also make no claims of originality here. Truly original thoughts are often suspect.

Target audience: people who are newer to blogging or journaling; people who haven’t reflected deeply about identity & Writing As a Thing. Also, me from six years ago.

I wrote the content for the class, but got some help along the way.¹

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Prompt for students: why would I want to talk about reasons not to write?

Some responses I expect to receive that I don’t plan to talk much about in class:

• Writing doesn’t actually “do anything”; you have to act upon the world?

• Can you get trapped in attempting to represent things that cannot be fully represented? See Map and Territory.

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Thesis: I argue that writing is really dangerous and that this is why you should do more of it.²

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Writing is Dangerous

Two categories of writing here: writing for others (public-facing) and for yourself (not public-facing.) Both carry dangers — especially when done with any intent beyond simply “I want to understand the Truth.”

A few (related) examples:

• If you’re posting writing for others to see, if you want others to feel things—

  • Subconscious beautification?

• If you want your writing to sound pretty and cohesive to you—

  • The world is jagged; how much information do you lose in writing if it’s designed to be clean?

• If you’re submitting to applications or programs—

  • Rejection of the parts of the self that you think you might be judged for?

All of these, in some way, reject some form of Truth in favor of presentability, cleanliness, or beauty.

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Why is it dangerous to reject some form of Truth?

• Calibration to the Real You, whatever that is.

  • If your version of events is too clean & presentable, you can forget the times you’ve made serious errors before. Then, when you do so again, your self-image is more liable to shattering or imploding.

• Narrativizing — “I did B because of A” is a common way in which we describe our actions. This attributes B’s existence solely to A. Reality usually isn’t like this; perhaps A is 50% of the reason B happened, and a bunch of other things comprise the remaining 50%.

  • This is a double-edged sword. You can actually change yourself into a Different Type of Person by writing about yourself in a way that doesn’t match who you (currently) are.

  • Personal anecdote: I think this post, accurate as it might have been at the time, had some hand in helping me believe (wrongly) that I had no competencies outside music for quite a long time.³

• Caricaturizing?⁴

  • Left image: This circle is me. I have some spiky points (things I’m good at), I have some little rectangles (things I’m bad at), and I have some half-baked swirly tentacle things (things which I’m sort of interested in, maybe, but not sure about?)

  • Right image: This circle is me, but the way in which I write about & present myself. I’m actually really good at the spike facing left in dark blue. That vague pink interest is actually a real passion of mine, and I’m an expert in it. No one actually cares that I’m super good at juggling⁵ so I won’t write about maroon on-the-right spike on my blog. You know that big weakness of mine, the big red rectangle top left? It doesn’t exist. And on and on.

• And if you consistently present yourself as image Right instead of image Left:

  • People who come across your writing will assume you aren’t strong in certain things that you are strong in, and thus will never have a chance to talk to you about those things, for example.

  • Little loves can shrivel and die. You can become a caricature of yourself.

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Interlude: “How is this limited to writing? Isn’t this about talking and thinking too?”

Short answer: yes.

Long answer: I claim writing is still different in some significant ways. Some of these apply to the content above; some of them apply to the content below.

• Permanence — compared to talking & thinking, this is the obvious one.

• Impermanence. A student⁶ brought this up: you can edit your writing. You can’t edit what you thought. (?)

• Real-time challenge. If you’re talking to someone else, they can actually disagree with you, or provide more context.

  • Harder to go down unproductive & ultimately dangerous rabbitholes on identity?

• Inexplicit thinking exists. Writing forces you to use words! This is not trivial. The very act of trying to use words to express thoughts/emotions sometimes changes those thoughts/emotions.

  • Map and Territory: reality is X. Your thoughts about reality are a map of reality; call it X’. What you write is a map of your thoughts; call it X’’. Now, X’’ can actually influence X’. That’s weird!

• Students probably will have more ideas.

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What if you’re not even trying to reject Truth?

What would it mean to write about the room we’re in?

• The room has curtains in front of the Big Window.

• The walls are beige.

• There’s a big notepad here that I’m writing notes on.

• There are a bunch of students seated around the table.

• etc.

The room is infinitely⁷ detailed. I didn’t talk about the specific students in the room, or the colors of the markers, or the texture of the curtains, or the composition of the air molecules, or the taste of the floor. And on and on.

Philosophically writing can be viewed as zooming in. When one journals about their day they zoom in on what they consider salient (i.e. social interactions, or progress made on whatever work they did, or how they felt at certain points of the day, etc.)

What if you’re unaware of this framing when you write?

• Personal anecdote: in my junior year of high school my piano teacher passed. I wrote about her in my college application during my senior year. I selected certain qualities I thought were relevant enough to squeeze into N words, where N is quite small, and wrote and wrote and edited and edited and re-edited and on and on. So I zoomed in on thoughts & experiences for the essay, then further zoomed in on sentences and words describing those thoughts & experiences …

• It should be no surprise that most of what I remember, six years later, is just what I wrote in those essays.

Writing is casting light; forget not what lies in the shadows. What should I have done?

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The Solution (?)

Write MORE and BETTER

-Lydia

Well, I don’t think it’s that simple.

• Consciousness: knowing some of the things in these notes may help.

  • Front-of-mind awareness that writing is zooming in; that writing is a map X’’ of a map X’ of the territory X that can change the map X’; that writing can change the way you are perceived by others and yourself; and more.

• Intentionality: know why you’re writing.

  • Writing an essay for a scholarship application: perhaps I want to craft a narrative where I did A, which led to B, which led to C. Perhaps it is nice and clean that way. Then I could consider keeping an entirely internal and More Honest version where maybe I do mention I did B sort of on a whim? And that C happened in part because I was late to an important meeting once, not just because of B?

  • Journaling: am I the type of person who glosses over the small wins? Or glosses over the times I was annoyed or upset during the day? Or do I not want to confront some more unpleasant realizations? Why am I journaling, and how does my choice of how to zoom in affect how I think about {myself, my future, my past, others, etc.}?

  • Creating something like Art or something designed to make people Feel Things: we fiddle with the truth constantly. And if you know the correct directions in which to fiddle with the truth, you can create some really Great Art. You can inspire people!

    • No claims of greatness for this, but I’m very aware of the places where I fiddled with the truth. I chose very intentionally where to do so!

  • The natural conclusion to this all is something with the flavor “Don’t write unless you are approaching it with care and intentionality” — which is a nice counterweight to the next suggestion. (This idea is also where the title of the class comes from!)

• “Write MORE and BETTER”

  • The more you write the more light you cast, the larger and more faithful your map. Write about everything!—well, with the understanding that your time on this earth is finite.

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Questions?

(Hopefully students have some. If they don’t, then something went wrong. Also, I should hope that I received at least a few challenges to the notions I’m presenting here. Would be rather disheartening if I didn’t.)

1. Thanks to Lydia for reading over my initial notes for the class, offering some important corrections, then convincing me to actually teach the class; thanks to David Yu and Damon for listening to my ten-minute runthrough, and to Damon for letting me teach the class; thanks to Ethan, Maria Eduarda, and Şefika for listening to my half-hour runthrough; thanks to Yanzi for being my first student test subject.

2. Wanted to be more of a hater and just say “don’t write,” but unfortunately Lydia and Damon convinced me otherwise. (This isn’t serious — this was never the Real Message. I did have a slightly different message at first, which is “write with more intentionality”; I still like this message and have it in here but was convinced that the current thesis is stronger.)

3. Didn’t talk about this in the actual live class because it would have been a lot to digest, but I thought it was worth mentioning in these notes.

4. Apologies in advance to any colorblind readers; you can assume the shapes will be oriented similarly though.

5. I don’t juggle.

6. Thanks Miles!

7. Close enough, for rhetorical purposes.