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Why We Write — Part 2

Author: Sean D'Souza

Why We Write

Why We Write

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.

Why We Write (And The Difference Between Thinking Vs Writing)

Author: Sean D'Souza

Why We Write

Why We WriteWriting seems so laborious at times.

We feel like giving up, but there’s a reason why we write. Actually, many reasons.

Right click to save this episode.

What are you supposed to do when a swarm of bees land on your car?

A bee swarm forms when a colony splits, and the queen leaves with thousands of worker bees to find a new home. The swarm temporarily stops somewhere, like on your car, to rest, while other scout bees search for a permanent resting site.

Your car just happens to be a convenient stopping point. Meanwhile, the scout bees continue their search. Once they've found a suitable location, the entire swarm disappears.

That's pretty much what happens to our article writing ideas as well. If you're the kind of person who is constantly curious, you're likely to have a lot of thoughts. The thoughts move along quickly only to be replaced by more thoughts.

And then those two are gone. And so we have to store those thoughts. We have to store those thoughts because we have to write them down. Writing, it seems, is more valuable than we thought. In this podcast, we'll look at four aspects of why we write.

  1. The first being thinking versus writing.
  2. The second is why writing creates evolution, then revolution.
  3. The third is the quest for elegance.
  4. And the fourth is the discovery of you.

1) Let's start out with thinking versus writing.

In 2024, after 15 years, I finally published a book called Suddenly Talented. Why 15 years, you may ask? The short answer is I was thinking. Not just thinking, but also discussing. I had hundreds of discussions on talent. I told people why I didn't believe in talent, or rather why I didn't believe in inborn talent.

Occasionally, I'd even write a few articles on it. I even started a sub stack. But the book, that proved elusive. It wasn't because I wasn't able to write. While I was threatening to write the book, I wrote several other books. I even wrote a few courses.

The obstacle in my way wasn't the lack of content or ability. If anything, there was too much of this buzzing going around my head. The reason why we write is because writing is permanent.

When you have a chat with someone, it's loose and often wonderful.

You don't have to worry about the structure and you can even sidestep some of the logic. But when you write, it feels like every word counts.

You and I go back and forth and back and forth, writing, editing, deleting, editing, getting ourselves a coffee, some snacks, going back to writing, struggling through the whole process. And we do this because we know there is a sense of finality to what we're doing. Writing forces you to be detailed yet succinct.

It requires you to explain yourself.

There's none of that random chatter or obtuse behavior that we experience when we're speaking. We write because we want to think better.

It's the reason why writing is so uncomfortable. It's not because you can't write, but because it feels impossible to corral all of those swarms of thoughts and then put them down in a way that makes sense. And we're not talking about good writing or elegant writing, we're just talking about writing.

When I wrote Suddenly Talented, my days were so much longer. If you ask me to write a thousand word article, I'll usually get one out in about an hour. If I have to write 3,000 words, it might take me three to four hours.

It's just that there are more elements to juggle. And when it came to writing the book, there were a similar amount of words, but still it took me ages. It seemed to drain my energy and make me flee to the cafe instead.

Is there a happy ending to this story?

Yes, there is. As you write, you get a better sense of what you're really saying. I will start writing a book or making a presentation, and it'll be day one, day two, day three. And when I get to day three, I realize that day three should be on day two, or some of the elements need to move to day one. And it's this constant reshuffling.

What's really happening is that you're getting a sense for what you want to say. And when it's in my head, I can't think like that. I can think of many elements, but not all of that clarity and sequence.

And that's what writing does for you. It forces you to put everything down on paper, because eventually you're not editing so much as moving things where they should be. Whether you're writing a booklet, a book, or just an article, you'll find that you're inundated with a pile of ideas.

And all of these ideas, they don't fit in that article.

They don't fit in that book. So they have to be pushed into new articles, new chapters, or even a new book. Nonetheless, there is a sigh of happiness. You've managed to put things down on paper, and you don't have to keep thinking, thinking, thinking endlessly, because it's finally done. It might not feel finished, but yet it is done.

Writing is a ruthless tyrant. It exposes your weakness and structure. It shows the frailty of your argument. But it forces you to express yourself better. If those were the only benefits of writing, it would still be a biggie. But there are only some of the reasons why we write.

The second reason is even cooler. It's about evolution and a touch of revolution. Let's move to the second part, where we look at how writing creates evolution, then revolution.

2) Why writing creates evolution, then revolution.

I don't know if you know it, but the brain audit has versions. There was version one, version two, version 3.2, and there is no version four. Why?

When I finished the third version, I'd covered what I wanted. The first version was more of a handout with fewer than 20 pages. The second was a lot better, but it needed work.

The third took months and was finally done. By then, I had been writing for almost a decade, so it was a finished product. Then a few years passed.

My niece picked up the book and started reading it aloud.

I expected to be proud of my writing, but I was cringing a bit. My niece covered a single paragraph, then another, and by this point, I was not feeling very happy, so I diverted her attention to another activity.

Even so, I was shaken by the fact that my well-written book needed a fair bit of tidying up. I don't know why I was surprised, because evolution is almost to be expected. If you write a lot, you are expected to get better, right?

Yes, you will, but evolution can be slow. For writing to get to a stage of revolution, you need almost constant feedback. At first, the input is soul-destroying.

Every part of your writing seems to come under fire, and it feels like you can't do anything correctly. When you get the feedback, you are almost surprised. You didn't want criticism, you wanted praise.

The first time I went to a watercolor class, I felt an intense need to be appreciated by the teacher. However, I realized that a single class, just one event, wouldn't have improved my work so much. So I went back a third time, a fourth time, a fifth time, and I thought, surely I'm getting the praise that I deserve.

Instead, he told me what I needed to fix.

I really get upset with these situations, but I was doing my best. It was improvement. And yet, I was not getting any praise. After 10 weeks, the course ended, we had a small auction of our work. Friends and well-wishers were invited to the auction. My watercolor was priced at $20.

And you know how the auction goes, like who wants to buy this one? $5, $10, $20. But something improbable happened. The auctioneer decided that nobody was buying my stuff, so he was reducing the price. So it went down from $20 to $10, $10 to $15, $15 to $5. And there were still no takers.

My wife Renuka stood there, not sure what to do.

If she bought it, surely it was going to be an exercise in pity. Eventually, the auctioneer gave up. And me, I had my feedback in real time. My work was worth nothing. At that point, you and I are supposed to give up.

We're supposed to believe that we're not talented, and we'll never be good at that skill. I took it as feedback. I decided to get better. I went back to the teacher, the guy who kept telling me that I needed to improve. I asked the teacher, how can I improve? And he said, paint something daily.

He suggested that I keep a visual diary. In a way, he was suggesting evolution, step by step, day by day. Writing is a day by day exercise too. Like any other skill, it needs critical appraisal.

A good way to get this feedback is to ask someone to read your headline, your first paragraph, the connections between the story, and even to see if your objections are good enough, but not to read the entire article. This is the problem that people make.

When you say write every day, they think they have to write an article every day.

No, you have to write every day. Just a little bit maybe, maybe an article, but mostly you have to write every day. And it's the same thing when you're getting the feedback. You can't go to somebody and say read my article. No, they have a life, they have problems, they have other things that they need to do.

They're not sitting there waiting to read your article. But if you say, can you read my headline? Sure, they can read your headline. Can you look at this objection and see if it makes sense? And yeah, they can do that. And sadly or happily, AI can do that as well.

But even if you're dealing with the sterile nature of AI, you want to ask for tiny bits of help, not the whole article, but just the objection, just the headline, because when someone, whether real or mechanical, suggests that the entire piece has gone haywire, it might feel soul destroying.

But when you ask for a specific piece of feedback, you can tweak just that one point, that one part. And this helps you even when you don't have someone to give you feedback. So just say you're working by yourself.

If you need to improve your headlines, you can start looking for headlines that seem to get your attention. And if you look long enough, you will start to recognize a pattern.

It's a longer process. It's more frustrating, but it is possible to give yourself feedback. There is a point in evolution where something seems to change. Something speeds up crazily. It's called a point of revolution. In some cases, we can predict when this will happen.

In languages like French, for example, once you pass through about 100,000 repetitions, that's 100,000 rep mark, you will have enough vocabulary and grammar to get a decent conversation going. With writing, just having a good subtopic and a headline will give you a push into revolution land. I've seen this time and time again.

Somebody will write a topic, and then they will tweak that topic just a little bit. And suddenly, that article comes alive. They're excited to write that article. It's not a generic article that you find on the internet. Now, article writing or book writing has so many elements. And as you add one more bit to it and get better at it and faster at it, you're well on the road to revolution.

However, there's also the plateau. No matter how good you get, you will plateau. Everyone does, unless they ask for feedback. Then someone points out a tiny little bit, something you've missed. That's when your writing perks up again. I wrote The Brain Audit in 2009 and Suddenly Talented in 2024.

Which of the two would have better writing?

It looks like an easy answer, but it's not. If I hadn't asked for feedback, my writing would have still improved, but it would have done so in tiny increments. In order to get exponentially better, I had to get input from many sources. You will want your writing to be evolutionary, but also revolutionary. Well, you know what you have to do.

You have to get feedback. Tiny portions of feedback, very tiny portions, and it will help you on your way. And with that, we come to the end of this podcast. There are two more parts.

What did we cover so far?

The first part was thinking versus writing. A lot of us think and think and think and think and think and think and think. And thinking doesn't get you anywhere. Thinking confuses you. Thinking leads you into any direction possible. But when it's written down, you have to go ahead with something. You have to tidy it up.

You have to reformulate it. You have to shuffle it. Shuffling is a big deal. Just moving things from day one to day two or day three to day two, that's a lot of work. But it's also a sense of organization. Your thoughts are much better, clearer.

The second part that we covered was that writing creates evolution then revolution.

And evolution is really painful. It's slow. It's frustrating. It seems like you're not going anywhere. And you aren't. For a very long time, it seems like you're just standing still.

But if you ask for feedback, and you ask for specific pieces of feedback, rather than read my article, you will find that you're improving and you're reaching a point of revolution.  So that's what we covered on today's podcast.

What's the one thing that I would suggest you do?

Well, the one thing that you should do is to stop thinking. There are lots of thinkers out there. They're all in this loop. They're never getting out of that loop. Stop thinking. Start writing. It's going to be bad. Get used to it. Ten years later, you'll still think it's bad. You'll still get used to it. Twenty years later, well, you know the story.

Why Every Day Learning Matters More Than We Think

Author: Sean D'Souza

Why Sales Pages Are Annoyingly Difficult to Write

We all seem to know how every day matters. However, what causes people to plateau suddenly and how does every day activity help in avoiding that messy situation? Dig deeper into the very average concept of every day learning and you’ll see it’s anything but mundane. Right click to save this episode. When’s the best […]

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The Four Arms Of Perfection – A Deeper Insight

Author: Sean D'Souza

The Four Arms of Perfection: A Deeper Insight

We all want to be somehow perfect. It doesn’t matter that we know it’s not possible. In this article, we have four crazy arms of perfection brought to life by writer Keith Rhys. I wish I could have said it better, but Keith (alumni of the Article Writing Course) says it eloquently. You’ll relate to […]

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DaVinci Alumni Special

Author: Sean D'Souza

Special Davinci Alumni Invitation — 70% Off the Cartooning Course Since you’ve done the Davinci 2.0 cartooning course in the last few years, I wanted to extend a special opportunity just for you. We’re inviting alumni like you to join the upcoming round of the course—at a 70% discount. This isn’t a generic offer; it’s […]

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The Five-Year Lease Concept (And How It Builds Resilience)

Author: Sean D'Souza

shiny object syndrome

Do you sometimes think you have “shiny object syndrome”? Do you seem to hop from one thing to another, only to feel disappointed? What if you couldn’t change your mind so often? That’s what the “five-year” lease is all about. You somehow have to make it work. Let’s find out how to use the “five-year” […]

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Suddenly Talent: Book Reviews

Author: Sean D'Souza

I bought three copies of Suddenly Talented- one for myself and one for each of my kids.Eric Warezak, USA. My 13-year-old drew this in 2 Minutes. (After looking at the whale drawing and following the steps mentioned in the book—Suddenly Talented.Monika Burger, Germany I gave the book Suddenly Talented to a teacher. Myself.Nicholas Anderson, USA […]

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