Writing sucks

Writing is lossy. I write with the intention to express my thoughts, and indeed, before I actually put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard? not as poetic), I feel like I have something coherent, something meaningful, and something definite.

The moment I start writing, it becomes painfully apparent that was never the case. An inextricable gap between the shape of my thoughts and the words on the page manifests itself—I refine the words and phrasing, then do it again.

I do it again and again, until the gap becomes just small enough that I can convince myself that the words on the page are in fact my thoughts. But they are not.

For what is the shape of a thought? When I imagine a building, I feel like I have a coherent idea of what that building is. Most importantly, it is very clear to me that this building I’m thinking of is in fact a building! But when I try to think about the details of this building, the number of floors it has, the number of windows, the precise shape, the entrance, the materials its made of, where the restrooms are, or any possible aspect of an infinitely complex set of choices, it becomes ever more obvious to me that I never really had a coherent idea of what a building is. Strangely, the harder and harder I look, the blurrier the image gets.

So which one is flawed—my thoughts or the words? Maybe the thought itself was flawed, since it’s so unclear. Or maybe it’s my writing skills, which are bad.

But it could also be the case that when I think of a building, I’m thinking of the amorphous collection of every single building that I’ve seen. Perhaps what is really happening is that when I’m observing the details of the building, I’m flattening out what is a beautifully complex image, an abstraction of what a building is into a single possibility.

Perhaps my thoughts unexpressed have a finer quality. The moment I try to express it in words, to linearize it, to reduce it to what is representable on a page, I reduce the essence of the idea and leave it as only a single arrangement of thoughts.

In balance, I don’t think writing actually sucks. I find writing to be literally creative – I write something, and whether it’s the process of writing or the shape of the words on the page that beckons back at me, I consistently find myself with new thoughts. It’s a rather unnatural and frankly remarkable process, for a thought to be created in a closed system.

And much of my problems with writing, is a skill issue.

Clarity through writing, though, feels like it should not always be a goal. I would rather feel more, think more, etc. I trust and respect my ’thoughts’ more than the words that I write. To some extent, I’ve got no other choice. In a less roundabout way, I think this is translates to “trust your instincts”.