A writer simply writes
which is different than writing simply.
I haven’t published in a while, but this morning I remembered that I’m a writer.
Before we start our day, some mornings Ken and I sip coffee together over what he calls ‘clickbait scrolling’ We look at the articles aggregated for us by our respective algorithms and take an overall analysis of where our heads are.
“Look at this one.”
He clicked on an article entitled “A House Built 9,000 ft Above the Ground Leaves Authorities With Many Questions and Concerns”.
It read:
If you find yourself in the Dolomites region in Italy, we suggest you look up–way up. Of course, it’s impossible to see from the ground, but if you could see 9,000 feet up, you might spot a peculiar little hut on the side of a mountain. And you might wonder to yourself, how did it get there?
The effort required to reach this isolated home is great, but the reward of picturesque solitude is even greater.
That’s it. I was furious for a second, but then, I realized that you could click on the photo and read another quip about this mysterious house. Equally as bland and poorly written. This article format is clearly targeted at people who don’t want to read long-form articles (almost everyone), but it’s awful and didn’t connect with the intended audience. I almost clicked away without reading a single thing about this besides location and altitude. I looked for the author and felt sad for Mia Williams. This is not writing.
A writer is responsible for the format, topic, and words they choose. If your work is to be broadcast on Msn.com, you’re choosing a certain type of reader, style, and medium. Mia chose Msn.com, where words on a screen are a substitute for writing. Mia flopped before she even penned a word, and of course, her article was shit (9,000 ft Above the Ground?). If you don’t care about what you’re writing, where you're writing it, or who you’re writing it for, are you even a writer?
Writing isn’t as much of a profession as it is an expression of necessity. Mia’s job at Msn.com fulfills a surrogate need to write. She likely feels the urge to write and hoped to get paid for it. I get it, but over time, this piss-poor substitute might wear on someone if they’re not fulfilling their actual need to express something deep within them. A writer needs to write. It’s a compulsion. I write every single day, most of the time, for myself, and sometimes, the need drives me to share. Write first. Share second. I hope Mia has another outlet where she can get back to being a writer, and I empathize with her.
I forget what it means to be a writer sometimes, too.
A writer is a balanced thinker. A shit-for-brains thinker is going to write shit, obvi. I have a lot of respect for writers who can organize their thoughts and get them down on paper in a way that is comprehensible and engaging. It’s no small feat. How many flaming piles of mindless trash do you read on a daily basis that were written for HR robots or polarization fiends? The people that put these ideas down on paper sit down to write and turn into walking file cabinets or scaley creatures sunning themselves on a rock. It’s either all engagement and no logic or all logic and no engagement. A good writer dances through the forebrain and midbrain all damn day. You just get to read some of it.
A writer must read a fuckton of diverse material. If you read from a broad enough swath, you develop an ability to see a writer write away. Good writing strikes you because it’s far and away from most of the stuff you read. Your mind instantly begins painting a picture of what the writer was seeing when their hands conjured words from thin air. If you see good writing often enough, you start to develop your own model for it, but in order to make your own model, you need to input a lot of high-quality data, and in order to find high-quality data, you have to sift through a lot of shit.
A writer puts simply writing before writing simply. Simply writing, is just sitting the fuck down to get something out. Writing simply is totally different. It’s typically a contrived process - unless the writer is a simple thinker. If someone sits down with the primary intention of communicating in a precise and simple way, they’re not writing. Writing is a compulsion. It drives you in such a way that you ignore the sloppiness with which the ideas arrive. From there, writing can be good or great. Great writing is great editing because only the compulsion is sated can you go back to cut threads, trim excess, and iron out the original thought. A great writer’s work appears seamless but oftentimes looked like the back of a cross-stitch before it came across your eyes. You can’t tell where the writer paused to think, or where they rearranged paragraphs. Paradoxically, a great piece of simple writing leaves you thinking ‘I need to read that again’.
This provoked and unsettled something in me. I casually consider myself a writer. By that I have meant – not so much that I am compelled to write, and certainly not that I regularly produce output for any kind of audience – but that the act of writing often brings me some of the deepest pleasure and satisfaction I have had or known in my entire life and across the range of all the activities which would seem like more obvious candidates for producing the experiences of “pleasure” and “satisfaction.” And yet… writing, when it’s really working for me, probably gets me closer to the experience of the intrinsic pleasure of creation as anything I know. If you’ve ever written something that really worked, and then re-read it to feel the words uncoil in your mind with their own inner living power, and then reread the words again for another dose of current and then read and re-read them again and again, the richness soaking into you undiminished with every iteration, then you know the drug. That is good stuff, and I’ve had it, but do I need it? And if I don’t need it, am I really a writer?
I don’t know. Or I do know: I’m not really a writer, not in the sense that Natasha is. Long eras of my life have passed in which I’ve written nothing that mattered to me or to anyone else. All of that being true, Natasha asks a question I can’t shake off. Who is a writer? Maybe Natasha’s formulation is too doctrinaire. Might the compulsion to write be at least partly a function of prosaic commitments one undertakes like “post something this week”? Maybe Mia Williams at MSN.com imagined the daily press to generate content (loathsome word) would make her a writer and instead it simply killed her spirit. Hard to know. Deadlines can be like that. On the other hand Bob Dylan once said he would never have finished an album if there hadn’t been a deadline for it. Bob Dylan! Anyway, we don’t charge out of the womb as pianists and oil painters and gymnasts and bee keepers and everything else under the sun. We become something. Perhaps I could become not merely a person who writes but a person who needs to write. This essay really makes me wonder.
9000 ft above the ground.. and no good story to follow it through. I can relate to your agony of writers not putting enough effort to share a readworthy story for their audience. But I also look at it as a gap where many others fit in. Are people still reading MSN?
Long form content written simply tells the depth of a writer, and they make you feel as if you were there.
At the end of the day, I write because i want to relive those feelings i felt while writing something at first place. I am not a public reporter but i share my stuff hoping others will find meaning through their own perspectives.