youngjin.io

Writing sucks

Writing is a lossy format. I write with the intention to express my thoughts and ideas. Before I write something, I feel like I have something coherent, something meaningful, and something definite. The moment I start writing, I realize that it is not the case. Sometimes I feel like I’m convincing myself by writing that the words on the page are in fact my intentions, but it’s not. An inextricable gap between the shape of my thoughts and the words on the page forms.

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.

It makes me wonder which one is flawed – my imagination or the medium. Is it necessarily the case that my imagination was lacking? It could also be the case that when I think of a building, I’m thinking of the amorphous collective of all buildings 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.

Similarly, perhaps my thoughts unexpressed have a finer quality to them. The moment I try to express it in words, to linearize it, to reduce it to what is representable on a page, I kill 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.

I do, however, trust and respect my ‘thoughts’ more than the words that I write. To some extent, I’ve got no other choice. Colloquially, I think this is translates to “trust your instincts”. When a dissonance manifests between my thoughts and my writing, my first instinct is to try to extract what I really think, rather than invalidate my thoughts. And extracting truth from yourself is difficult work.

tags: rants