WRITING

How To Write With Power

We write because we love it. And it makes us better. Here is a short guide to what I’ve learned about writing with power.

When you write, you want to communicate something to your reader. Feel free to tell them a story, if you want to, or maybe persuade them of something. Be polite, and remain aware that whatever you’re arguing has a counterpoint somewhere in the world. You’re going to be wrong. But that’s how communication works — it’s very difficult to do well.

An old teacher of mine used to quote someone I can’t remember as having said that good writers had to be willing to “call a fool a fool.” I stumbled over that, the first few times I read it. But as I’ve moved through life, the clumsy little phrase has stayed implanted in my mind, like a thorn that simply won’t go away. It comes out sometimes, when I write polemic, like this piece, which has outperformed almost everything else I’ve written on Medium.

I take the axiom a bit further than polemic, however. Calling a fool a fool is not simply about identifying fools — it can be about identifying anything. You want to use the right word to refer to the thing you have in mind, and you need to be willing to have something at stake as if you’d just told someone they were an idiot to their face and might need to defend yourself. What are you defending? Your integrity. It’s all you’ve got, if you’re a writer.

Enough chitchat, though. Let me tell you a story about a certain kid I used to be.

High School

When I was in high school, I took part in a competition called Academic Decathlon. It involved ten events throughout academia and a select few of us got to compete for cash prizes in them. I wasn’t great at school, but my GPA undersold me by a significant margin and got me into the Scholastic division, for kids between 3.0 and 3.9 GPA. I had something like a 3.2x but was very good at chess. The best in my class, in fact. A few decathletes saw me beating up on a patzer in the cafeteria one day and invited me to try-outs for AcaDec. I aced them and signed up for the team.

In regional competition that year, I had one of the best days of my life. I wrote the best essay in any division at the competition, score-wise, a 980 out of 1000. It was a persuasive essay, and I kept it for many years but it’s disappeared now. As soon as I finished, I got on an airplane and flew to San Antonio to watch the Rolling Stones play a show, courtesy of my badass father. I was great at writing and we were going to celebrate.

College

I thought of myself as a writer once I arrived at college. I started off with an economics major, but when there wasn’t really any substance there, I felt I had to change disciplines. I went to political science, but again felt constrained. I stumbled into philosophy via an elective Intro course, the same sort of course which I later taught, and it was fascinating to watch the young minds come online. Added some perspective to the experience I’d had years earlier at Southwestern University, where my writing style was questioned and restructured even despite my protests.

I published essays in a variety of places during my time at graduate school at Texas State University, most notably Philosophy of Language (2015) ed. Brian Thomas. Then I graduated and taught for a year — an occupation with such unbelievably lousy pay that I was forced to take up rideshare driving to make ends meet.

Professional Life

I worked in publishing as a researcher, after that. There were tensions between myself and my office mates, and I got fired for reasons I still don’t quite understand but basically they just didn’t like me. I got a solid severance package out of the deal, which financed one month of nonstop work on my philosophy book, Formal Dialectics. Then it was back to rideshare, and I started a tech company with a friend. My written work got us into a few meetings, but our general no-name status got us shut down before we even finished the first version of the product due to lack of funding.

I took a job as the first employee hired after the CEO at a biotech company after that, doing research into biophysics and vascular physiology. It was really weird. We had a pig farm for awhile. I used a machine to measure the zeta potential of blood samples and evaluated various chemicals for the ability to increase this property of the colloidal components of the blood. And I wrote everything from investor-facing documentation to a patent and a 20-page whitepaper detailing our scientific argument. We raised $2M, but didn’t get anywhere in the lab and I think the guy who was the main investor is the CEO now, so I have no idea what’s going on there anymore. Everything about that whole experience was a wild, wild ride. I assume they’ve pivoted; I heard they sold the pig farm shortly after I left.

The Pandemic

During the pandemic, I’ve been fortunate enough to hole up in a house my parents used to rent out and just simply write. I’ve probably written over 2,000 words per day on average for the past six months, perhaps the past eight. During that time, I’ve done a book and over a hundred pieces for Medium, Cent, Publish0x, Cryptowriter, PhilosophyNow Magazine, and probably at least a few others I’ve forgotten about. And I’ve started to make money at it.

I’ve discovered that the source of my appeal as a writer is the skill I learned in philosophy school: finding the good. In the philosophical sense, that simply means looking at whatever a given situation is and putting the effort in to figure out what’s appreciable there. I admire the works of Chuck Bukowski because the man has a sense of what’s good and what’s awful and he uses both to leave these sorts of impressions with the readers. It can be quite jarring, but this only lends more power to the man’s work. Some people find him revolting, and I agree with them. You have to scrape a lot of scabs away to get at what’s good about Bukowski.

I tend to be more oriented toward creating systems and solving problems in my own work, but much of writing involves making the emotional connection between the points you’re presenting. Do this one thing well, and the conclusion just sort of slams itself home.

Shoot Straight With Your Reader

What’s the point of this story? Actually, I hope you weren’t asking yourself that just now! My goal here has been to use a narrative about my past to convey a message about how immersed I’ve been in reading and writing my entire adult life, and what strikes me as the most powerful and compelling part of the written word. The first section established potential that I had before I grew up and lost my innocence, the second section detailed the difficulties I faced as I failed to break into academia and with college more broadly, the third section described a sort of awakening that happened as I failed my way through a bunch of weird jobs, and the fourth was about just doing the thing you want to do instead of inventing reasons not to.

The narrative shores up the point, which in this case is mostly the words. How much evidence does it really take to drive the moral home for your reader? How deep is the narrative, really? How important is word choice? I think once you read enough and think deeply enough about the things you read, you’ll start to realize that it’s all about a sort of flow that happens when you do it well, and not so much when you do it poorly. Sometimes you need to be very specific, but other times you need to sound conversational.

Try out a few of these motifs and see what sort of response your audience has to them. The practice will help you learn how to drop the perfect word in just the right place to effectively communicate your message to your reader. You don’t even have to explicitly write everything that’s on your mind — the important thing is what goes through your reader’s mind when they read you. Your job as a writer is merely to learn the craft of causing the correct sorts of events to take place in your reader’s imagination.

The most important thing to remember? Shoot straight with your reader. There’s an art to it, but you’ll figure it out if you put the effort in. It’s all about staying aware of the various angles present in any subject you pick up to write about.

I believe that structuring a story in a way that possesses this sort of flow is one way to keep your reader coming back for more, each time the eye flicks to the next word or sentence. It’s amazing to see people coming up and speaking their own truth in a way that can resonate with a wide audience. Something tells me that this mass internet literacy project we’re all in the middle of is one of the most powerful and explosive catalysts we’ll see in coming decades. And the most beautiful part of it all is that we’re all learning, all the time.

Contact the Author

Thomas Dylan Daniel is a philosopher. Connect via his website or Facebook, or have a look at his books. Find him on the blockchain at epicdylan.eth!