Why do we write? For people like us, writing is a career – we willingly embrace words to earn our bread and keep. For others, it can be a hobby or an escape. However, for people who are on the fence about writing, one common worry is whether anyone would bother reading what they write. If you’re one of these people, hopefully we can convince you to make the leap into world of writing today… because writing doesn’t always have to be for others – it can be for the self.
Why we do (or don’t do) the things that we do
The human mind is a strange and wonderous thing. Before we decide to do anything, we are capable of visualising the process and any associated consequences. If we take exercising as an example, we know that being healthy is good for us, but this alone isn’t enough to motivate everyone to attain a beach body. This is because of a small nagging voice in the back of our minds – an inner self that constantly reminds us about the struggles of exercising and how we have to give up on all our favourite foods and comfortable lifestyles to achieve the desired result. The process of training our bodies causes discomfort, and it’s this aversion to discomfort that prevents us from fully embracing healthier living.
Writing is very much the same. We convince ourselves that we will sit down and write something over the weekend, but when the time comes to write, we put it off with some sort of excuse:
“No one is going to read what you write,” your inner self says spitefully. “Why bother putting all this effort onto a piece of paper when you know that there’s no one to share it with? Besides, writing is hard! When was the last time you even picked up a book? What makes you think anything you write will be any good? Let’s go watch football instead.”
As NHL Hall of Fame’s Wayne Gretzky once said, “you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” The sort of defeatist attitude above is not only incredibly cynical, it also shuts down the motivation to try. Furthermore, the excuse uses the line of thinking that there always has to be an external audience to whom you are writing for. When we think of writing, we traditionally think of books, news pieces, web articles and the sort – all of which are meant to be shared. However, that’s only one branch of writing. More importantly, there’s no rule saying that you can only write for others! Don’t worry about whether or not people will buy your ideas. Don’t worry about SEO and how to optimise your writing for Google. All this is irrelevant before you have words on the page, so focus on writing for the most important reader: yourself.
The act of unfiltered writing is coined “therapeutic writing”. Although it’s commonly centred around experienced traumas, you can write about whatever you want – be it a journal, an outlet to express frustrations or even a list of reasons why you liked/disliked a movie. Since there’s no one who will be judging your work but yourself, give yourself permission to write badly. Don’t feel compelled to think out a fully fleshed out narrative or whether or not there are grammatical errors and typos – furthermore, resist the urge to give yourself a word limit. Write as much as you feel like. This is the first step to becoming more comfortable with writing.
The road to improvement
Although unfiltered writing is a fine way to write for stress relief, its lack of structure is not the most presentable. If you are an aspiring writer who hopes to get their works out to the public in the future, then you need to do more than just write casually. A good way to improve is to put down time restrictions whilst working and to learn how to revise your work. Although adding time pressure removes the destressing element, it trains your brain to work faster. Doing so not only improves writing consistency, but quality as well. The benefits of this style of working are best explained by John Swartzwelder (a former writer of The Simpsons during the show’s prime) in an interview with The New Yorker:
How much time and attention did you spend on these scripts?
“All of my time and all of my attention. It’s the only way I know how to write, darn it. But I do have a trick that makes things easier for me. Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue—'Homer, I don’t want you to do that.’ ‘Then I won’t do it.’ Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it. So I’ve taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight. I advise all writers to do their scripts and other writing this way. And be sure to send me a small royalty every time you do it.”
As creatives, we can attest to the fact that the ideation and conceptualising phase is notoriously difficult. Considering the number of limitations and restrictions that are often imposed with each brief, novel ideas don’t come around as often as we would like. Instead of sitting around waiting for the perfect idea, it’s almost always better to roll with mediocre ideas and then see how they can be improved.
If you aren’t convinced, try comparing the results of these two exercises:
A. In 30 minutes, write an article about something you are passionate about. It can be about your favourite food, hobby or why you absolutely despise Mondays. Do not edit the piece and focus on writing as much as you can.
Revisit the piece on the following day. Are there things that can be revised and improved? Give yourself another 30 minutes to edit the piece.
B. In one hour, write one article about something else that you are passionate about. You can edit and rewrite as much as you like during this time, but you will not have an opportunity to fix anything once the hour is up!
How’d you do? From this exercise, it’s common to find that you performed better in exercise A than you did B. Why? Because it’s unrealistic to expect perfection with one attempt. It’s why second and third drafts exist. Even when writing an episode of The Simpsons, Swartzwelder’s team goes through multiple rewrites before the episode is published. “If a joke survives all that, it’s probably pretty good,” he says.
Regardless how much you wrote or whether you write professionally or casually, putting your thoughts down on paper is an excellent way to destress and to get in some valuable alone time. When you feel like adding a bit of a challenge, add a time limit or some other constraint to push your creativity to the next level!