I like to imagine that a couple of thousand years ago, our ancestors worked really hard to put their thoughts into words and words onto paper. Writing for them was hard not just because it was an activity reserved for priests and scribes, or because ‘freedom of speech’ wasn’t as widespread a thought as it is today. But because plainly speaking, writing is HARD.
Look how far we’ve come, I think.
Since those couple of thousand years ago, we’ve moved from hand-written scrolls, through mass producing printing press giants and into the present-day digital publication platforms. Words are still the most effective communication tools. Though more writing is now accessible than ever before, much of it is still raw. It is so easy today, to get lost in someone else’s published drafts.
Seeing your words out in the world for a few hundred eyes to read, is an achievable dream today for anyone with a smartphone and internet access.
Drafts were not just a self-imposed quality check tactic back then.
Pre-internet, you had to send a ‘final’ draft of your work, via snail mail to newspapers and magazines. Between writing something and seeing it out there, you had to hope that some editor, a professional of the written word, would think your piece worthy of a little bit of column-space in the ‘Letters from our Readers’ section.
What you read is what you write
Reading online, for me, is about opening interestingly titled articles to scan the first three lines and determine whether I should start scrolling in search of bulleted points, or slow down and drink in the nicely worded sentences. The latter almost never happens because bite-sized chunks of information is the norm of the day. My mind is now attuned to listicles serving up perfectly sized ‘that’s so me!’ scoops for my declining attention span.
I was disappointed with myself when one day I opened a 250-paged work of fiction and started scanning through paragraphs looking for the gist of it, out of habit. That day I bought ten more books and forced myself to mindfully read every sentence going forward. I don’t intend to go to the other extreme either which is reading everything that I lay my eyes on.
Much like the proverbial way in which ‘I am what I eat’, my approach to reading since that day has been the same.
No more junk. No more scanning the page. And no more deluding myself with “If I keep reading, I might actually start liking this book.” After all life is too short and there are only so many books you can read in it.
You can be anything.
Every flash flood of articles about the next big thing in tech, every tweetstorm about someone’s opinion on politics and every Tumblr post someone poured their midnight thoughts into is remarkable because somebody somewhere, got over their fear of putting their thoughts into words and sent them shooting off into cyberspace. Regardless of the quality of the thought and correctness of the grammar, it is yet another work added to create the ever–evolving collective story of human existence and its consciousness.
Even though every sentence you read out there isn’t exactly Hemingway, there is something to be said about the effort taken to express.
Paraphrasing the advice almost every great writer has given at some point “If you want to write well, start writing, dummy.”
