The purpose of writing is to present new ideas that have the power to change minds
Writing is all about ideas. Mining them, discovering them, generating them, or stumbling upon them. I’m mainly talking about the personal essay, but I don’t think it really matters what kind of writing it is. It’s all communication of one sort or another and requires the same answer to the same problem. What’s the big idea?
Storytelling is my form. It’s the structure that draws the reader in and lets them wander around a bit, unattended and unfettered. The true purpose of writing, though, is to present new ideas that have the power to change minds. That’s why we exist as writers. As readers, we don’t actually give a shit about your trip to Cabo. We already know there are hotels, beaches, snorkeling, and Piña Coladas. Tell us something only you could tell us. We want to know what you learned while you were there. Everything else is navel-gazing and a waste of our time.
Even something as frivolous and seemingly meaningless as comedy must serve to illuminate the collective recognition of our absurd existence. The best comedic takes are personal and use specific, authentic details that set up a premise about some aspect of the human condition. The laugh is merely our involuntary response to recognizing the truth of it. We are surprised to realize that we recognize the truth of this otherwise absurd premise, but have never thought of it quite like that before. That’s comedy. The involuntary recognition of truth.
I’m sometimes flummoxed by those who say they enjoy my writing. I certainly don’t want anyone to stop praising my craft, or anything else I do, for that matter. I’m a grubby little whore when it comes to seeking praise. It’s a compliment, and I take it as gracefully as I can. But writing is merely a skill that can be learned. It’s a parlor trick; an elaborate performance using words, language, and culture to express ideas.
It’s the idea I’m most interested in. It’s the insight those ideas carry that I’m most proud of, and the thing I want to talk about. Talk to me about writing, and my eyes will glaze over as I start searching for an open window to jump out of. Talk to me about ideas, on the other hand, and you have my undivided attention.
A reaction to the idea is what I’m looking for from the reader. What did you think of the idea — not my obtuse sentence structure, use of run-on sentences for comedic effect, or affinity for arcane words and phrases? That’s just personal style. What about the idea?
I love the challenge of writing about mundane things and starting small, but in reality, there are no small ideas, just fragments of larger themes. The art of writing is the platform with which to deliver these ideas, these nuggets of gold. It’s all about the gold. What is the philosophical argument for why we do and say these things we do and say? What is the point of the story? What is the point of any of it? That’s the struggle. That’s the task at hand. Nothing short of the meaning of life, even if it seems like on the surface, it’s a story about garden gnomes and toadstools.
We don’t cherish Animal Farm because of the language or the form, but because of what it represents. The story itself exists to peel back one more layer of the onion of existentialism. If you let the pigs wear pants, all hell is going to break loose, and innocent people are going to die. There are big ideas in that little book, and we would do well to heed their warnings. The story explains the idea, but it is the idea itself that we take with us.
When we’re starting out as writers, we think it’s all about story, largely because that’s what we’ve been told. We strive to engage the reader with humor, vulnerability, authenticity, and substance. We work to build strong openers, contemplative and illustrative middles, with compelling and memorable endings. Story structure is important because it gives the reader a reliable framework with which to trust you, but there’s no point to your twisted tale if there’s no broader theme or takeaway. It’s not a story. It’s an anecdote. A story must have a purpose that is based on an idea that reveals a truth.
This is why I’m constantly pushing writers to dig a little deeper to find the purpose in their stories. The elements are often all there, but they’ve glossed over some important part or left another out entirely. What did you learn, and what are we meant to take with us? Why did I take the time to read this if you weren’t going to take me somewhere worthwhile? Connect the dots. Don’t just get me lost and leave me there. Show me the way home.
I suspect this is why we sometimes struggle to write about an episode or life event. It’s why we often need a certain amount of distance from it before we can tackle it. It’s because we don’t yet know what it’s about. We understand it happened, and we recognize the drama of it, but we have yet to discern the lesson. We don’t know what it means.
I learn by writing. It’s how I process the world. This means that I don’t always know where I’m going when I sit down to write. I know the subject, presumably, but I might not know what the larger theme is. That’s something I find along the way. This is a helpful way to think about it because you don’t need all the answers to begin.
As you’re telling your story, you ask yourself what it’s all about, and if you’re in the right mindset, it will come to you. It’s simply a matter of considering the larger themes at play. Think in cliches, and you’ll see what others see. Broad themes are not meant to be unique or specific. That’s the whole point. You have to ask yourself, how is my story like millions of others that have come before it? That’s the reader’s way in. How is this like all the other stories? That’s what it’s about. Then you make it yours by inserting yourself into the cliche. Make it unique by filtering it through all your experiences, biases, and idiosyncrasies. This is the magic.
For clarity’s sake, when I talk about big ideas, I’m not talking about originality. We aren’t referring to patents and inventions. You don’t have to invent an entirely new thing to write. The ideas are all as old as time. It’s your understanding and interpretation of them that makes it yours. Originality is overrated, and insight is often lost in the chaos. We are not just searching for truth, but wisdom. How can we view this age-old problem in a way that helps us cope today? Maybe you think you started out writing about bug spray, but discovered along the way that it was really about perseverance or tolerance.
My sister was visiting from Florida, and we were talking about writing. She mainly works for Disney in their theatrical department, but she’s written novels, short stories, and poems, and is currently working on a play. She was explaining her process, which is similar to mine, in that she writes without knowing where she’s going, and discovers the big ideas along the way. She writes a shitty first draft that allows her to build the bones, then she works to find the soul, that spark of imagination that makes the story come alive. Then she can go back through and breathe life into the story so that it becomes flesh and blood. Essentially, you write so you can lose yourself, and then you edit to find your way back again. You lay the groundwork, and then you go back and fine-tune.
After many years of working in branding and marketing, I’ve learned that nearly all creativity is a happy accident that someone recognized as valuable. We don’t make much of anything. We discover it by trial and error. We try different things over and over, using cliches and things we’ve seen or done before, until we stumble across the new idea that sparks our imagination. The talent or skill is recognizing gold when you see it. We’re not alchemists, despite all the hocus pocus being taught. We’re miners.
From a practical point of view, we don’t begin with the idea most of the time. Maybe something has occurred to you in the shower or on your daily walk, and you think it’s something you want to explore. That can work, but then you have to try and decide what the examples are.
This, to me, is very difficult work and makes writing harder than it should be. It’s the same with developing a theme and an outline and then trying to transform that into prose. I suppose that would work well for something like technical writing, but there’s no romance or mystery there. I prefer a more adventurous spirit; a wanderer’s journey into the abyss.
I approach most writing with a scene, anecdote, or premise and then treat the story as an independent, sentient creature with a will and a plan all its own. My job is simply to get out of the way. I am a typist and a transcriber, tasked with getting it down on paper as faithfully as possible, to the best of my ability. I have enough skill, experience, and talent to organically tell a decent story the first time through, but it’s not complete.
The first draft has inconsistencies, contradictions, extraneous concepts, random ideas, weak paragraphs, and nonsensical sentences. I typically fix these as I go. I finish a section and read back through what I’ve already written, correcting and refining as I go. I am not really a shitty first-draft kind of writer. I don’t just spit it out and then go back and rewrite it all. I rewrite and edit as I go. I don’t need it to be perfect, but I keep going back through it to correct for clarity and flow. Does that paragraph work? Does that section track? Does that anecdote even belong in this story?
I don’t get all the way to the end before I know what the story is about, not usually anyway. I write until I know, and then I decide how to move forward and what needs to change to make that work. Everything that isn’t about that idea, or isn’t in service of it, gets cut. Then I begin to flesh it out and massage it so that it reads as if I knew where I was going all along.
This is what I mean by happy accidents. It’s not real magic, because there’s no such thing. We don’t have second sight. Our brains are amazing vessels holding untold treasures. If we can get into a flow state where we’re operating a little less consciously, details and ideas will flow. Forward momentum counts for a lot, and typing is the catalyst. Just keep writing, and ideas will fall out of your ears and onto the page.
I always come back to the idea that while there is never one way to do things, there are an infinite number of ways to do them poorly. It seems to me that many a writer gets stuck because they’re fighting the natural flow of things. They’re attempting to impose their will on their writing, and that never ends well. The way I look at it is that you can’t be too heavy-handed. You are there to guide the story, not to control it. Small nudges. A trim here. A cut there. You’re shaping a hedge, not trying to invent the concept of shrubbery. Refine the thing that already exists organically.
I think in cliches to begin with, meaning things I’m already aware of. It’s a reason why I often begin with a scene from a movie, a line from a book, or a lyric from a song. Some remnant of an idea I have previously been exposed to, that illustrates the idea I want to explore. It’s like that, I want to say. Then I think about examples from my own life that I have a deeper insight and a personal connection to.
I almost always begin with the germ of an idea, and I get right into the meat with no preamble. But that’s a terrible place to start, so inevitably, that gets pushed back with an entirely new opening that helps to set up the premise. It’s a lot like joke writing. I begin with what I think is an interesting idea and begin to write about it. At some point, something triggers some bit of insight or truth, and I begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. So that’s what this story is about, I say to myself. Now I know where I’m going, and that informs what is missing and what needs to be cut.
The realization comes from the writing, not from anywhere outside of it. You have to be typing, in my experience. Walking doesn’t hurt, but that’s more like ruminating. Eventually, you have to sit down and write. Writing is where the ideas come from.
My wife has been learning to make sourdough bread. Our daughter has been making it for years and created a series of video tutorials for my wife and her sister. It’s very step-by-step, with a lot of rules and exacting requirements. This goes against everything my wife knows about cooking, which is all feel, taste, and touch. My wife reads recipes as suggestions and inspiration rather than as a road map or guide. This is just the way one person did it. She’ll take it from there and make it her own. From that, she can extrapolate what is important and what is not.
Baking is much more scientific than cooking. You need to do things in the right order, with the correct measurements, for the proper length of time, and at the prescribed temperature. It’s no wonder baking never appealed to her.
From my own journeys in dealing with dough, I know that while all those rules are critical, once you have some experience under your belt, you stop being so precise and learn where you can get a little loose. I’ve been making pizza from scratch for over 20 years now, and while I can give you step-by-step instructions, I sort of wing it at this point. I do it by feel, rather than by calculation, but the calculations are still in there.
The point is that while guidelines and rules can help you learn the process, they’re not a roadmap for success. You have to take the journey yourself, finding your own way through the countryside. Like most things in life, you have to learn the rules before you can begin to break them. You have to write by touch and feel, but first, you learn how to build a proper foundation. Once you have outgrown the rudimentary rules, experience borne of trial and error becomes your guide.
The only way to get there is to write. This is why everyone talks about 10,000 hours and other cliches of experience over academic knowledge. It’s not just learning the rules, learning persistence, and surviving the pain, though all that is necessary. There’s just no other way to get there.
Imagine there were no airplanes and no automobiles, only horses and wagons, and you needed to get from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. That’s about 2700 miles over some pretty rough terrain. If you want to get there, you have to take the trip. There’s no quick and easy way. You have to go mile by mile and deal with it all along the way. You have to be self-sufficient and able to improvise and adapt to ever-changing conditions. But if and when you ever get there, you’ll have a wealth of knowledge and experience.
That’s the journey of a writer. If you want to reach the Promised Land, you might as well pack your bags and start walking. The longer you wait, the longer it’s going to take you to get there. Don’t think about it too hard. No sense in daydreaming about frolicking in the Pacific before you’ve even left the city. Imagine what is just west of Philadelphia, and begin there. One foot in front of the other. A mile at a time. One day, you’ll wake up and find yourself living in Santa Monica and wondering how the hell you got there, but you won’t really care.
The great thing about pain is that it has no memory.
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