WRITING | LIFE
Writing Is Easier When We’re Living a Life Worth Writing About
On the necessity of thinking about more than mere thoughts.
Perhaps there’s no better question to illustrate the problem of being a writer than, “What on Earth am I going to write about?”
This is even more true today when it seems as if the only way to succeed on social media is to produce a ridiculous quantity of work so as to eventually break past the “noise barrier” that stands in the way of any would-be creator eventually achieving independent status.
Whereas some people say that quantity eventually leads to quality (and I’m inclined to agree, on some things), the downside of this approach, at least for writers, is that we have to constantly churn out words.
When we do that, it’s easy to be overtaken by the dreadful feeling that we are producing nothing more than hot air that does nothing other than inflate our egoic balloons.
Writers— serious ones, anyway — don’t want to feel like they are producing hot air or empty rhetoric. They want to feel like they are diving deep into their own ground of being so as to pull out something fresh and insightful that can be of benefit to others.
The best writing — so the greats say — reflects something true about reality, helping bridge the gap of experience that exists between human beings.
If we want to produce great writing, then, we somehow need to make sure that what we write is more than mere thought-play, more than simply uptaking the ideas of others and regurgitating them as our own — a practice that is all too easy on platforms like Medium where, too often, beginner writers (myself included) try to emulate the greats by emulating their thoughts, rather than producing thoughts of their own.
Important as emulation may sometimes be (good advice bears repeating), I’ve often had to question whether or not that approach helps me feel more authentic as time goes on, or if it distracts me from creating a life that will allow me to feel like I finally have something worth writing about.
British philosopher Alan Watts elegantly described the problem when he was discussing one of the aims of meditation, which is to get out of our thoughts from time to time so as to directly experience life as more than the words we conjure up to describe it.
A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So, he loses touch with reality and lives in a world of illusions.
― Alan Watts
It’d be remiss of me to not mention how deeply uncomfortable that quote has made me feel at times, especially as someone who has set out to make a living from the written word.
It’s discomforting because it’s true.
Writers — including myself — often fall into the cyclic trap of never really getting outside of our heads.
We write about what we’re thinking about, but we get stuck writing about the same things over and over again because we’re never really challenging ourselves in real life and therefore breaking and reforming our thought patterns.
In other words, we cling to the ideas that we’re comfortable with, and never really make an attempt to challenge those ideas by testing them in real life.
It is, after all, more comforting to think about life than to live it.
And I suspect this is even more true for writers who, at least in my experience, tend to be on the more introverted side of things.
At least, it comforts me to imagine making a living by hammering away on my keyboard all day long from the comfort of my own nook, rather than having to enter the more extroverted world of business or what have you.
That being said, I’m well aware of the fact that no fresh insights will come to me unless I’m directly engaged with life in its non-thought, non-word forms.
Put another way, if I’m not making some attempt to live a life worth writing about, then my creative reservoir is going to run dry eventually, turning me into more of a thought-automaton than a living, breathing, dynamic human being.
This is part of the reason I have gotten back into physical fitness, started playing basketball again, and have started regularly practicing the guitar, which I’ve wanted to learn since middle school before giving up at some point in high school.
While I’m not going to even remotely suggest that I am competent at these things yet, the challenge of working on each of them has helped me feel more justified in continuing this blog.
And each of them has helped me come to a fuller understanding of what Alan Watts meant when he suggested we ought to “think about” more than mere “thoughts.”
Because you see, when we train our bodies to do something — such as perform a push-up, get a ball into a basket, or play chords on a musical instrument — we are, in fact, engaging in an altogether different type of thinking, one that connects us to reality more than our thoughts — which are abstractions — can ever hope to do, and one which helps us get in tune with and explore our feelings, which are perhaps the only things worth writing about.
This isn’t to say that the written word is inferior or worthless.
On the contrary, good writing can help inspire people to get into their own direct experience of reality themselves.
But too often, writers remain lost in a world of words, moving from post to post and book to book as if somehow this will eventually help us to produce written gold of our own.
I’ve learned, however, that if I want to continue developing the confidence I need to produce my own written works each day, then I need to be living a life that I’ll feel proud to share with others.
Having tried the approach of being only a writer who plays with words, I can safely say that it didn’t work for me. At some point, I started to tread a line far too close to grifting for my own personal taste, and it was then I realized that I had better back my writing up with something other than writing, or else I might lose myself.
Maybe only writing will work for it. If it does, I congratulate you for figuring out what I couldn’t.
But the more I seek out ways to directly interface with my life outside of this blog, the more I feel like I have something to bring into this blog to share with others.
On the downside, this means that I may not truly feel like I’m justified being here until the rest of my life “catches up” with where my head would like me to be.
But on the upside, looking to life for inspiration — rather than merely other people’s words or ideas about life — has made me feel like, with enough time and patience, I’ll finally feel like I’ve bridged some chasm, some gap, between my thoughts about reality, and reality as it unfolds itself to me each and every