We sometimes believe we write for a client, or for a website.
And that belief is true. Except, it’s not true for most of the time. There comes a time when we go on a trip, a discovery of ourselves. We write for a completely different reason. Let’s have a look, shall we?
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My neighbour gets a weekly supply of veggies delivered to her door.
Within that mix of greens is always a cabbage, and sometimes two. Her family is so sick of cabbage that she's more than happy to get rid of it. The next thing you know, that cabbage is on my doorstep.
The problem with cabbage is that you can only eat so much, unless you turn it into cutlets. You add chopped onions, carrots, chilies, assorted Indian spices, of course some salt, and then you get magic. I know it's magic because when I gave my neighbour those cabbage cutlets, she asked for the recipe.
As it turned out, the kids wolfed down a dozen cutlets in minutes. Her husband, who wanted to burn the cabbage, thought the cutlets were great. The family then set about making cutlets for their own consumption.
Articles can be like cabbage.
The words and ideas we combine can make us want to abandon the whole writing process. However, there's always a way to make your writing look wonderful. Essentially, you're taking the ordinary and adding a touch of elegance.
The core goal of writing is to corral our thoughts, to put it in put it in that little fence and close the door. It's to ensure that we discard the millions of ideas that don't matter. We need to get rid of the unnecessary details and the mind-numbingly long sentences.
We want to get a point across, and the sentence needs to lead to the next and the next and the next. But then, writing takes a turn. We don't just want to peddle information. We know AI can do it way better than we can. We start to realize that we are not writing.
Instead, we are selling an idea. We want people to change the way they think or do things. Now, that moment calls for more than a plain old cabbage AI. And that's because sales is a transfer of enthusiasm from one person to the other.
Bugger.
Are you saying we have to be enthusiastic?
Yes, that's the progression of writing. It's a sales pitch no less. But done with so much finesse that the reader cracks a smile. They see the misdirection. They know they walked into something really cool. And like my neighbour, they want the recipe too.
You've been listening to Why We Write and this was part three, which was about elegance, and how elegance can make a reader want to come back over and over again. It's not about editing, it's not about tidying up your stuff and fixing your typos, but getting to a point of elegance, which takes time.
And this is not about practice, it's just doing something every day. Not writing an article every day, but writing every day. And that's when you get to elegance. But this also takes us to the fourth part, and that is why writing is a discovery of you.
4) The discovery of YOU.
A city is always surprising to its own citizens. You realize how little you know your city when someone visits. That visitor makes trips to different areas of the city, eats at different restaurants that you've never heard of, and they start to describe your city to you in a way that causes you to wonder if you're kind of stuck.
Most of us usually live in a suburb, visit the same supermarket, and work within a familiar radius.
We rarely venture outside our daily routine, which is why it's so surprising when an outsider asks you questions that you can't easily answer. When someone asks you questions, you feel you should have the answer to them.
It's not like you're completely clueless, but there isn't a sense of clarity to your answers. It feels like you have to reorganize your thoughts, maybe do some more digging and exploring. But it's not enough to think, because thoughts are like fireflies.
So we have to write. Back in 2005, I decided to teach the skill of article writing. I already knew how to write articles, or so I thought. However, the moment you create a course, you realize that you have lots of gaps in your instruction.
You realize this because the questions come in a trickle, but often in a torrent. Many of these questions may seem mundane enough until you start to write out the answer. That's when you realize you need to do some research.
Which is odd, isn't it?
You're doing research on what you should already know. That's particularly true because writing exposes the holes in your knowledge. This means that you are answering the client's questions while fixing the fumbles in your understanding of the matter.
You should know this stuff. You should be able to express it, but you don't. And when clients ask these questions, you somehow have to put together an answer that makes sense. And this is what writing does. It's also the moment when something unexpected happens.
It's common to start writing an answer, and then land upon an entirely different issue that needs solving. For instance, I may start writing an article about how to create reverse testimonials. And then I discover something that I wasn't expecting.
While taking screenshots of the reverse testimonials on our site, I realized there were different aspects of the testimonials. Some were exceedingly long, and others were not more than a few rows long. Some stayed on topic and explained why the product suited them, while other testimonials spoke about their perceptions.
It had nothing to do with the product. As I dug, I started to find a whole new set of angles to reverse testimonials. And this is a discovery of me. This is a discovery of you. You have to ask yourself, who am I writing for? Myself or my client? The answer seems logical enough. You're writing for somebody else. But it's not that clear cut.
Sometimes we write for ourselves, like I will draw for myself. I have kept a daily visual diary of my life since 2012. I've done watercolors. I've taken photographs. And I've done these things purely for my benefit. And sometimes I've had a client's question, and I realize I don't have a neat enough explanation.
The most exciting moment is when you set out to answer a question, only to find yourself slightly lost. You don't know where you're going, but you know there is an endpoint to it. And then as you go down that road that you should know, but haven't gone down, you find a treasure trove of questions that no one has been asking.
This level of insight is your own. It's a discovery that you make in your own time. You're driven by your own intense curiosity. And if you're the kind of writer who wants to populate your website, then all of this is nonsense. You don't want to take this route.
You want to just jump on AI, slap in some prompts and get some answers, tweak it a bit, and there it's on your website. This level of digging means you have to consider a new set of questions, questions that haven't been asked before. Your work has increased many times over.
So why bother?
If all you want to do is write another article, why bother? People have many motivations to write. I write because I want to find an answer to a question that exists. I don't know that answer. I don't know that road in my own city. But that's what I want to do.
Most of us write at the beginning because we have a website to fill, and we have newsletters to send out, and we have things like that to do. We share mundane and everyday, and we've been told to do that. And yet, eventually you discover that writing is about you. Writing is when you discover what you know, but you don't know how to express it really well.
Or something that just jumps at you from absolutely nowhere, and you go, where did that come from? So writing is a discovery of you. And that brings us to the end of this podcast, but also to the end of this very small series, just two parts, not a series really.
In this article we covered four things. The first is, what is writing about?
Well, we have to compare it with thinking. And thinking is this swarm of bees that shows up but then takes off. And these ideas keep running through your brain. And like me, you probably take 15 years, or five years, or five days, but these ideas keep popping in and zooming out, and so you have to pin them down, and that's why we write.
The second thing is that writing creates evolution, then revolution.
And if you really want to improve your writing, then you're going to take some of the information, not all of it, and then relook at it, like we do with all our courses and some of our books. They're not just sitting there, as they were written 5 years ago, 10 years ago. They get rewritten, and it creates evolution and revolution.
But even if you were just to sit down and write every day, not write an article, you know how many times I'm saying this, not write an article, but write every day, then you will start to see evolution.
And at some point, it just takes off. I don't know that moment, but there is a moment, and it takes off, and you never look back. Then, you will start to do some other kind of writing, and you will struggle, like you have always done before, like we have always done before.
But that evolution and revolution happens. People who don't write well, who believe that other people are better writers than them, the reason for that is they stop, they pause, they write every now and then. That's not going to work for you. You want to create evolution, it's continuous.
This brings us to today's episode, which is the quest for elegance.
And at some point in time, you realize that you're not just writing because you want to put words on paper. You're not doing what AI does. AI does an excellent job, but you're going for elegance. You're leading the reader one step ahead, and it's like a little mystery, a little dance.
And finally, and this is the most important, I think, it's the discovery of you.
You discover who you are, because as you go on that journey, you discover your own city, your own country, your own space, in a way that you've never thought of before. Someone else asks you a question, or you set out to look for something, and suddenly you start discovering yourself.
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