Why Write?
file under: THE STACK
this one is from: AMBIKA
In the last few months, we’ve somehow created an impromptu series on the craft of writing. I wanted to end this series by sharing some words I recently heard about why it matters that we learn to write well—more clearly, more engagingly, more poetically even. These words come from a recent conversation between podcast host Sean Illing and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, during which Coates went on, in his own words, “a rant” about this subject.
As you likely know, Coates has recently been publicizing his new book The Message, which is about, among so much more, what it means to be a writer. In his conversation with Illing about the book, Coates is asked to consider the possible tension between paying attention to one’s craft as a writer and paying attention to the most urgent issues of our time. At first Coates acknowledges something of a tension here, saying, “I love the beauty of language…but the fact of the matter is that living in a time like we live in, maybe living in any time in American history, period, or maybe in history, period, it doesn’t feel appropriate [to focus on making beautiful writing].” When it is your job to help “people see things that are normally maybe obscure to them,” Coates initially suggests, perhaps it’s a waste of time to work on writing beautifully?
But shortly after, Coates dissolves this tension: “To young writers who might be listening right now, if you can write beautifully, clarifyingly, I actually think it brings you closer to using your craft to have the world that you want to see…If you give a fuck about the writing…people enjoy it more, and because they enjoy it more, they’re more apt to read it, and so the thing you’re trying to get across is actually more likely to be consumed if you give a fuck about how it sounds, if you give a fuck about how efficient it is…wow, I really am cursing a lot!”
With or without the swearing, Coates’s message resonated with me. To write as beautifully and clarifyingly as one can is not important in and of itself. Rather, it’s important because of what beauty and clarity allow for, what they might create in the minds and hearts of one’s readers—first attention, and then maybe openness, clarity, and perhaps even change. There’s very little that we can control about how our work is received and what impact it has on the world, but writing with care—care for the reader’s experience, and thus for the prose itself—gives us a better chance.
Rodrigo Pereira
(The other thing that improves our odds, Coates insists, is honesty. “Your writing is at its strongest when you’re not lying...not just to your readers but to yourself,” he says. Amen to that.)
All of this said, one can’t really announce, to oneself or anybody else, “I’m going to write beautifully so that people listen to me.” It just doesn’t seem to work that way. I liked how this idea came through in a recent conversation between journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro and comedian and late-night show host John Oliver. Garcia-Navarro asks Oliver about his why. Why do he and his not-insubstantial team at HBO conduct tremendous amounts of meticulous research on deep and difficult topics, from election subversion to hospice care to abject conditions within prisons, in preparation for each show? “Are you trying to make the world a better place?” she asks, and he guffaws in response, before saying, “the most important thing to me, and to lots of people at the show, is to do this [in-depth research] in service of writing really funny, weird jokes about interesting things…what we want is to get the best ingredients that we can to write comedy from. That’s the really honest answer.”
Which is to say, there’s something magical about genuinely coming to love, and staying in love with, the craft itself.
Looking Forward:
In the last month, we’ve been busy with preparing for and then delivering a sensemaking workshop for an amazing consortium of Canadian ecologists called ResNet. We’ll be telling you more about our work with ResNet soon!
In the next weeks, we’re also planning to launch a series of science communication wisdom from Liz. If you’ve ever had a conversation with Liz about scicomm, you’ll most likely have experienced how she casually drops in ideas that completely change the way you think. For example, her “moments, memories, and meaning” framework for finding the beginning of a persuasive story certainly changed how I think and talk about storytelling. Our goal in the coming months is to write down as many of these ideas as we can, to make sure we don’t forget them and to share them with all of you, so that we can build upon them together.