One Year of Writing and Thinking
It’s been one year since I started writing. I have come to see the entirety of human existence in a different way. I have come to see the process of thinking as a demanding, difficult endeavor.
Thinking isn’t just what you do while you’re sitting on the couch waiting for the game to come back on, or while you’re sitting in the waiting room waiting for the doctor because you arrived early like a responsible citizen. Thinking, real thinking, requires your entire body and large amounts of your time. It’s focus; it’s a process. For me, it’s writing.
I have learned a few things this year.
Writing often is not about presenting a finished product, but a sample of one’s thinking. Or a record of the thinking done at a specific time and place.
It requires iteration through garbage to arrive at what is useful (just like anything else worth doing).
It can be surprisingly hit or miss, even when the writer himself isn’t aware of how or why. Even Stephen King, in his memoir On Writing, admits that he was often unsure of why his biggest books were so big.
And writing, just like I mentioned before with old adages, often produces a relativistic message rather than an absolute one.
It is so hard (in fact, it is impossible except for the absolute most brilliant and clear minds in our species) to produce writing that is “complete.” To produce writing that addresses the entire scope of something all at once. To lay out a whole argument, thoroughly, without missing obvious details and massive "yea-buts." It’s so hard not to miss (or forget) something when you’re writing. For most of us, it simply isn't possible.
Every time you read a marvelous nonfiction book, you are absorbing what feels like a complete and unassailable discussion of a topic. You think you’re learning solid chunks of wisdom that you’ll be able to carry forth with you the rest of your life.
But all it takes is to read a few more books and you realize that that first book wasn't as perfect as it felt while you were reading it. There are other essential parts of the conversation that the author didn’t even mention, let alone discuss. Different value structures and priorities, economic perspectives, social perspectives, cultural perspectives, historical perspectives… there is always more.
Behind every life-changingly brilliant essay is an author who knows he missed something.
And therefore reading is not about reading one or two classic books that will solve your life. It’s about taking a little something from everything you read, and playing the long game. By the long game, I mean spending your entire life building, refurbishing, and fine-tuning your life-living machinery. Your thinking machinery, your decision-making machinery.
And so it is with a writer — you don’t publish something and say “ok, that’s solved, I’ll never have to touch that topic again.” No such finality exists; the game is long and iterative.
I have found repeatedly in my writing that, every time I publish, I feel good about what I wrote. I feel like I said something. Something worth saying. Something worth holding onto.
And, within days (or even hours), I realize that there was something that could or should have been incorporated into my argument or my offering, that would have made it more coherent or fool-proof or thorough. Something that would have made it more complete. (If you don't feel this way after publishing, you probably weren't tackling something big enough.)
In fact, sometimes within minutes I'm already struck with some sort of ironic clarity that tells me what I should have said. Nothing makes me think more clearly than hitting the publish button. How cruel.
It’s like all those conversations you have with yourself in the shower about how you should have said this and that to so-and-so when they did such-and-such to you. Who you are in the shower has a clarity that you’ll never have in real time.
All of this has led me to see nonfiction writing (and to some extent even fiction writing) not as an endeavor of conclusions or solutions, but of iteration and development. It is rarely an endeavor that leads to something that is “finished.” It’s not just about one piece, it’s about a body of work and the growth of your thinking and organizing skills.
It is an exercise in pushing and pulling — making ideas slightly better by working with them as one works with clay. It is an exercise in testing things out and seeing what sticks. Seeing what has staying power. And often doing so publicly, with your reputation on the line. Nothing garners you better feedback than being publicly right or wrong. It's painful but useful.
And when you finally arrive at something that is just about perfect, which is bound to happen eventually, it feels more like the exception than the rule. It feels like good fortune and the planets aligning, rather than the common and earned privilege of a good writer.
An example of such hitting and missing from the realm of fiction is Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
What an outstanding book. Unlike Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn develops a rich and chronologically sound narrative. It tells one cohesive story, rather than a bunch of small, disjointed stories like Tom Sawyer. After many years of less ambitious writing, it was Twain’s magnum opus.
But my god, did he screw up the end of that book.
The first two thirds of the novel are powerful and immersive. Hard to put down.
But then things change. Suddenly the story is no longer about Huck or Jim, but about Tom Sawyer’s ridiculous imagination. Yes, Tom Sawyer somehow shows up 500 miles from home in Huck’s book… and hijacks the entire plot. What an absurd, dumb way to keep the story going. I have no idea what Mark Twain was thinking. The story goes from beautiful and compelling prose to unforgivable incoherent nonsense, and then ends. It just ends.
Maybe Twain had something going on in his life at that point. Maybe he fell out of love with this particular story. Whatever happened, this will forever be a prime (although extreme) example showing that sometimes as a writer you just can’t capture it all. You might produce perfect, you might produce rubbish. You might even produce perfect and then rubbish in the same piece.
You deliver what you can deliver onto the page. And, once you reach the point of diminishing returns or diminishing affection, it’s usually better to just publish and be done. At least if part of your work is rubbish, you can hang onto what isn’t. But getting to the good stuff requires sifting through (and sitting in) the trash.
And being a (nonfiction) writer requires being okay with publishing something with holes in it; knowing that you’re publishing something that is certainly missing something important. It just comes with the territory.
After reading everything I’ve just said, you might ask, “well then why is writing worthwhile at all? If you’re always missing something and it can be punishing and sometimes grants you no benefit, why do it at all?”
And I don’t really have a good answer for that. I suppose one answer is because when you finally put into words an idea that sticks, with you or with your reader, it is redeeming. It makes all of the punishment worth it. I suppose the answer is because, just like anything else in life, the good moments outweigh the bad if you let them. And they leave something with you that is worth having.
It’s the commerce of ideas that matters, not the fact that all of them are imperfect. I wouldn’t trade my reading and writing for anything in the world.
I was reading an excellent essay on Epsilon Theory and I recognized some ideas that conflicted with some things I wrote in my recent crypto piece. Or at least I saw that they were worth discussing alongside each other. To broaden the scope of my points and grant them a fairer chance at being proved either useful or rubbish. The scope of my piece was so narrow, so focused. It was only about cryptocurrency and the extreme dreams thereof — it missed so much.
Which led me to this realization: writing, much like old adages, is about navigating, not arriving. It's often about moving from the extreme toward the nuanced and useful. It's often about moving away from bad thinking and bad behavior, and toward good thinking and good behavior.
For instance, in The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel does not prescribe to you how you should handle money. Because that’s up to you — there is no answer the book could give. What he does is illustrate how bad people are with money, and why, and then trusts you to fill in the gaps. He offers you the book as an addition to your “thinking about money” machinery. It’s nothing more than that.
The trouble is, what is "good" is so hard to define (and so impossibly difficult to put into words long-form) that often the best a writer can hope for is to simply move the needle. To move himself and his reader away from "bad" or "not useful." It is difficult to come up with something "good" that won't later be assaulted from a direction you weren't even expecting.
There is no limit to the writer's capacity to overthink, and add more, and dilute the quality of what he's already saying. It could go on forever. Only the most organized and lucid mind could possibly hope to achieve an essay of the scope and thoroughness that it desires. And so... we write what we can to move a litter further from bad and a little closer to good, and we stop and publish. Because that's all we can do.
We can't do it all. So we do it in pieces. That’s writing.
And this brings me to why writing is so important. You've heard people before say that in order to think, you must write. Or that writing is indistinguishable from thinking. Because it forces you to separate wheat from chaff in your own thoughts and emotions.
It forces you to carefully select words. It forces you to select words that are, even if not certainly true, at least don’t feel untrue. It forces you to build a defense that will be tried in the court of reason and experience. And it forces you to admit when you know your defense sucks. Only a psychopath can put words on paper that feel untrue and then leave them there.
It forces you to actually be accountable to a specifically proclaimed opinion. And that requires some god damned commitment. It requires diligence and clarity. It requires you to actually figure out how to convey something, rather than leaving it in vague mental images that you can't even test or share with others.
And so writing does something more: it crystallizes. It puts your thoughts into a hard form that you can then test and reflect back on. If you never crystallize your thoughts, it's too easy to get caught in the trap of mental fluidity — the trap of letting what's inside your head slowly change, migrate and morph without you noticing, and then telling yourself the story that you've always thought this way. Letting your thoughts be pushed and pulled around at all times by new information, constantly existing in a state where everything inside your head is not actually your own. It's the noise of the world bouncing around in your head without form or purpose.
You think you're "thinking," but all you're doing is hearing noise from stuff you haven't sorted through. You think you have opinions, but what you actually have are the opinions of others that you have fooled yourself into thinking you came up with and you believe. It's chaos. And none of it belongs to you, because you haven't taken the time to write it down and yank out what's useful yet. To yank out what is honest and good and true, and throw away everything else.
If you don't crystallize your thoughts, can you really even claim to have opinions? You literally don’t even know what you think. Why would you ask someone who has no experience in plumbing how you might fix your leaky faucet? Why would you ask someone who has no experience in politics what they think about complex political ideas?
If you haven’t measured and tested your opinions on things, why should anyone listen to you? They shouldn’t. At least not about anything complex.
And I know that sounds harsh. But the average person deserves to be spoken to harshly. For letting his mind be nothing more than cheap real estate.
Ordinary conversation helps you crystallize some of your thoughts. And that’s a wonderful thing. That’s why we speak to each other. It helps us organize ourselves. While casual conversation is an exercise in finding words, writing is that exercise to a level and depth that cannot be achieved casually.
And that's why I'm writing a blog.
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Drink water while I go stew about all the things I should have said in this post,
JDR
“A book is never finished; it is merely abandoned.” - incorrectly attributed to various authors
“I write to discover what I think.” - Daniel Boorstin