As anyone who has read the handful of writing I’ve put ‘out in the world’ over the last few years knows, I’m not very prolific. Some of this is simply due to bandwidth. Shockingly in the age of social media and an endless ocean of ‘content’ and ‘listicles’, writing is actually hard and time-consuming. At least it is for me. It’s almost like writing could be a vocation unto itself…
I’ve taken a lot of personality assessments over the last few years. I’m an enneagram type 3 with type 2 a very close runner up. “The Achiever”, “The Protagonist”, “…diplomatic, charming, into performance, and image-conscious”, ”they feel a constant inner pressure to “have it together,” ”. I’m always a bit shocked at how spot-on these observations feel when I read them. What it all boils down to in Twitter-length summary:
I want to have an ‘important impact’ on the world really bad. I can be cripplingly image-conscious and I have an ever-present fear that I am not doing ‘enough’ in any given moment.
So what does this have to do with writing?
My quest for what it means to have ‘important impact’ has evolved a lot. While I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, I’ve become pretty convinced that writing will play a significant role. Writing is a powerful means of expression, and happens to be one of the few I’m relatively competent in. As I look across figures through history that have lived lives and done things I respect, writing has usually always played a role.
So why have I only written a handful of ‘pieces’ in the last 4 years?
Here the dual poles of personality come to bear… I want to have an impact, so I should write, but my image consciousness means I struggle to ‘show’ any piece of writing for fear that it may not end up covering me in enduring intellectual glory.
Sidebar: The name of the first blog I tried was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the irony underlying this fear, the arrogance of imagining that enough people would read what I wrote for it to have ANY impact on ANYONE.
I'm Going to Try and Just do It
I’ve read quite a bit about how to become a better writer this last year, including Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ and, just last week, an article from Jessica Wildfire who I’ve recently enjoyed reading on Medium. You probably won’t be surprised, a common theme from everything I’ve read on the topic: to get better at writing, you should write a lot. Practice makes perfect, everything you write probably won’t be your crowning achievement, just do it anyway. Engineering degree programs are pretty light on writing, so neither of my sojourns through university education gave me much practice. As much as I've recently toyed with the idea of going ‘back to school’, for now it looks like I’ll have to practice writing the old-fashioned way.
A Note (to myself) on Context
Besides my personality quirks, there is another factor that plays a role in me not writing enough. I’m not sure if it’s an artifact of my engineering education or my last decade of philosophical deconstruction, but I’ve noticed that I always feel the need to unroll THE WHOLE chain of context underpinning anything that I write. While this type of rigor is useful in technical reports, I think it holds me back a lot from just writing and sharing what I’m thinking or reading, it's likely also quite boring. There is some poor aide in Senator Rob Portman’s office who is incredibly tired of reading my letters tracing the implications of the Senator’s last vote or statement to the philosophical roots of the enlightenment. I’ll be attempting to get less wrapped around the contextual axle and just write, whether or not I can trace the thought back to Descartes or articulate a fully formed ‘solution’. Get ready for an exciting deluge of half-baked ideas…
