As the saying goes, "hobbies without talent" — and yet I keep writing every single day. There's not a day I don't pick up a pen (or rather, a keyboard). Sometimes it's a blog post, sometimes a work document, sometimes a stream of prose on Twitter that may be of use to no one. Every day, without fail — which makes me something of an addict. And this condition has been getting worse since I got my first smartphone in 2010.
The smartphone is the true "personal computer" in the literal sense of the word. One device per person, or more — mediating the self and others through LINE, WeChat, Messenger, and other communication apps, or through Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and other social networks.
Snapchat is one of the most innovative products to accelerate the wave of non-verbal communication, and yet written communication has not faded because of it. Most people produce written words every day, in varying quantities.
I write. You write.
But why do we write? Have you ever stopped to think about it? What do I gain through the act of writing, through the artifact of a piece of writing? Let me think through this briefly.
1 / Writing is a dialogue with yourself
The internet is public. When you compose writing for a public audience, it has a purpose — it's meant to move someone and connect to an action. Or at least, it should be.
And yet Twitter and Slack gave us a kind of permission slip: "Not every piece of writing has to carry that weight." Writing itself can be the dialogue, the thinking. Writing can be its own purpose, I realized — the act itself is what matters.
The peculiarity of Twitter: Twitter is a stream of raw thought. 99% of it goes unedited. The naked trace of thinking. Have you ever looked back at your own tweets and felt embarrassed? That's because they're words before they've been dressed.
The things written in tweets are the draft minutes of a dialogue with yourself. Blog posts, by comparison, are tweets with clothes on. A blog already has a customer perspective built in — "How will I be seen by others?" A book, by contrast, is formal dress. Black tie, tuxedo.
I enjoy using "naked words" to have conversations with myself. I use the act of writing to exchange information with myself. Human beings absorb information through all the senses, accumulating it in the precision machine called the brain — in enormous quantities, most of it forgotten and never retrieved. When I want to pull something out of that personal big data, I write.
Twitter gave many people the civic right to "spin naked words" and built a stage that makes it easy to do so. When I want to enjoy a dialogue with myself, I often open Twitter without thinking about it. I imagine many people have had that same experience.
2 / Writing is art — self-expression
Writing is the fullest form of self-expression I currently have available. KJ, the frontman of the band Dragon Ash that I listened to obsessively in my youth, said something like this in a recent interview:
When it comes to how I present what I'm thinking to others — for me, it's lyrics, it's music. I often say that I might be writing songs the way someone who isn't a musician might write a blog. I turn something into a song to preserve a moment, or to keep a feeling from fading.
When I write a blog post or a work document, I'm putting into it the feeling: "This is who I am — please understand me." For me, writing as a "work" is what music is for a musician or painting is for a painter. Sometimes I want to dress it up formally, but most of the time I write something not far from improvised. If I put on too flashy a costume, I feel like "me" stops coming through.
Simple, short, clear to anyone without ambiguity. And stating things plainly, like a man — without fear of criticism.
Those are the kinds of writing I like, but more than that, it's the kind of life I like. My writing — my art — doesn't have great depth, but since I've lived a life largely unconcerned with introspection, I want to express things as clearly and directly as possible. That's what I aim for when I write.
People who know me in private might get this: I almost always wear plain or minimally detailed T-shirts. The clothes I pick without thinking tend to be that way — it comes from a personality that wants to be unfussy, clear, and direct. In that sense, fashion and writing are the same.
The impulse to "convey something" is primitive — it's in everyone, and it's the essence of art. Simplicity and clarity up front seems to be my vector.
3 / Writing lets you hide
Clear and direct, and yet somewhere a little scared. That's a side of me that exists. I'm often misread as fearless, but that's incorrect. Overcoming fear is just a daily routine. I've gotten used to it — that's all.
So I declare things plainly and claim not to fear criticism, while also being afraid of criticism. Publishing something feels genuinely embarrassing in the moment. But criticism surfaces blind spots I hadn't seen, so I try not to run from it. That said, hearing it face-to-face is something I still struggle to enjoy. In those moments, I use writing.
Writing hides me from other people and delivers only "my argument," cleanly. Whether I'm in pain, scared, blushing, high, or happy doesn't matter. To the people who know me, and to the people who don't, the words extracted onto the page go directly to the reader, as they are. Sometimes to tens of thousands of people.
A slightly timid and bashful version of me can hide behind words and "convey" something to many people. That's what writing is.
In closing
Writing words every day, I sometimes find myself wondering: what is the difference between a "word" and "kotodama" — the Japanese concept of a spirit dwelling in words?
According to Wikipedia, kotodama refers to the belief that spoken words carry spiritual power — that good words bring good fortune, and ominous words bring misfortune. Prayers were recited with great care not to be misread or mispronounced.
The idea is that what you voice becomes reality. I interpret it this way:
"Thought" is conducted in words. The reason human beings have such extraordinary cognitive capacity compared to other life forms is that we developed "language" as a tool. Language enabled deep, heavy thinking.
Most human action passes through thought. So the idea that "voiced words somehow affect real events" is not necessarily spiritual — there's a certain rationality to it.
Writing persists beyond its moment. Unlike conversation, which can only be consumed in the moment it occurs, writing can become "kotodama for the future." I pick up the pen hoping to become kotodama for some future person. That person might be a stranger, or might be my own son. That possibility is what makes writing fun for me — and that's why I write.
