It cannot be misunderstood that writing invites itself into every corner of our lives. It is an exercise that is rehearsed, polished, and expanded when it needs to be. No doubt we write a lot, despite its linguistic difficulty or our struggle to find the right word in our expansive catalogue of synonyms and antonyms.
However, this struggle conveys a slow construction of an integral part of our identity. Writing is a personally possessive trait. It should not be only subjected to competence. No, it is more than that. Writing is our personal brand — a signature, a celebration that is a visible expression of our social, political, cultural outlook.
Writing is the utterance of our language, an image of our language. But what makes writing enthralling is its vastness. Another arm of consciousness, writing is a way of deeply translating our attitudes, interpretation, covering every detail more clearly than, say, speaking. Writing has no boundaries, no distance. It seems to be poetically symmetrical with the world: we can write about anything without it feeling out of reach. Like painting, we have a palette that we use, including conciseness, clarity, and above all, conviction. We can style how we want to come across, or how we want to frame it. Quite simply, we are only limited by our enlightened creativity.
Writing is an exercise that seems to always generate intellectual excitement or discussion. Some writers, like Susan Sontag, saw writing as a compulsion, a literary engine that never seems to exhaust itself.
Further, writing is a vehicle for describing what it means to be independent individuals or thinkers. It facilitates advocacy, virtue, debate, personality, or brutality, but it can also summon beauty and defining prose. No doubt the greatest writers — Hemingway, Morrison, Orwell, and Kafka — saw writing as a form of emotional and intellectual endurance, a way of unveiling a new sensation previously hidden, not properly thought of, or treated with suspicion by those who saw it as a threat to power. Following on, thinkers saw it as a means of advocating protest, a demonstration to regimes or policies that denied the rights of being human, be it Václav Havel, Franz Fanon, or Harriet Beecher Stowe. Writing can spawn change, and it is certainly the most human trait we possess.
As with a sport or a muscle, practising writing daily registers greater depth and nuance in what we see through writing. It should not be confined to a classroom. We should practise through journalling, through a simple gesture of appreciation, or by writing a personal essay ungraded. Strengthening writing elsewhere can be emotionally and cognitively beneficial. Writing about the best moments of our lives can help us remember them even better. We can describe scenes in depth: who we were with, the lighting, the joy, what we saw, and so forth.
It seems essential to write in the same way we choose to read, and it is detrimental if we refuse to write. We are not ‘bad’ writers. None of us are. Writing can explain who we are, what can be conveyed across, and help us understand our identity or who we are more intimately.
Writing for ourselves is a message to ourselves; understanding the feelings or interpretations can articulate a lot more than simply registering an emotion or idea and severing engagement. Writing is by no means an easy feat, but it is truly rewarding. So next time, keep a little notebook, write down something you want to remember. Writing anything is a motif of our identity.