Write On! – On Writing Revisited Pt. 2

When I first decided to rewrite this series of blog posts, I wanted to stay on a monthly schedule until I felt the topic was fully explored. Yesterday, I found myself contemplating pushing this segment back one week, but in an effort to stick to this schedule I'm buckling down and getting to work with On Writing Revisited Pt. 2. If you're curious to read the original seven part On Writing, you can FIND IT HERE on our old blog. It's a completely different animal than this current series because I'm taking a different approach to writing this in 2025 vs the original series which began in 2018. Having said that, I am going to continue the "Why" part of why I write from last months Part 1 of this series, but this time I'm going to generalize the "Why" and look at it more in terms of why people or possibly you, the reader, should write.

I think most people in the 21st century have this idea that there needs to be a defined reason for someone to write. These reasons range from writing for a job to making lists to be more organized. While I understand this mindset, I think its part of the reason why writing has declined as much as it has. Not enough people talk about writing for pleasure, writing for correspondence, or just writing because you enjoy the way the pen feels running across the paper. I understand that writing takes time, and time is something that often feels like we don't have enough of. It's a precious commodity, one that has become intrinsically attached to a dollar value, which makes it even more difficult to use time (an asset) in the pursuit of something as frivolous as writing. As I get older, I have become less and less happy with this view of writing and have started to make specific decisions to counter those thoughts when they pop into my head.

The more I considered what I wrote in Part 1, the more I realized I wasn't doing myself many favors when it came to writing. That if someone asked me for advice on why they should write, I'd inevitably tell them to set aside time to write for themselves. To prioritize some form of personal writing whether that was personal journaling, correspondence to a friend, jotting down items for a memoir, or sketching out a potential character arc for a short story or novel. This is advice I'd give anyone, but I would especially give this advice to someone who writes as a part of their job because something I've noticed time and time again is that my work writing suffers and becomes far more homogenous when I'm not engaging in enough writing outside of my job.

The brain is a funny muscle, while extremely powerful, I think it can also be lazy; or at least my brain can be lazy. When I'm doing a task I've done once or twice, I am completely locked in, making sure I don't miss a single step. As time goes on, I rely more on muscle memory and my brain wanders. It wants to multi-task in an attempt to get another task done or to find something to entertain it. This phenomena shows up more frequently in my writing when I'm very stagnant in the type of writing I'm doing. I don't have to engage certain areas of my brain, I'm writing on autopilot. This showed up recently in the "This Week in History" segment of the newsletter when I stated that M*A*S*H was about a military hospital unit during the Vietnam War, which is not the case, it was set in the Korean War. While I haven't watched ALL of that show, I've watched enough and had it quoted to me during my time in the Army that I know that information. But I was reading through multiple pages of history facts several of which referenced the Vietnam War, and my lazy brain shoved that time period into what I was writing.

What does this have to do with why people should write and why they should write different styles, topics, or for different outcomes? Because it's my belief (based on my personal experiences) that engaging in different types of writing or reasons for writing engages the brain differently. When I write fiction, I'm creating a narrative, even if it's based on experience or historic events, I have license to move things around and communicate differently than if I was writing something for work. Even in situations where I'm writing a newsletter segment on music or movies, the style of writing and communication I'm doing is different than what I write in a work of fiction. The same is true for my journaling which takes a far more personal tone, often includes shorthand, and is very fluid and free in terms of the template I'm writing in. I think it's important for people who write to make an attempt at writing different styles and reasons, and my anecdotal evidence is that it will make you a more satisfied writer at the end of the day. I'm NOT saying it will make you a better writer, I'm not sure what makes a person a better writer, though I do think reading and writing a lot do help. I think personal satisfaction is overlooked as an adequate goal for writing something.

And I think that's the best way to wrap up Part 2. If you're not getting some personal satisfaction from writing, your writing is going to start to suffer. Eventually, you'll stop writing altogether. Lack of time is often listed as the main reason people don't write, but personally, I find I write less when I'm unhappy at the prospect of writing. When it feels like nothing more than a task. When there is no feeling of accomplishment or emotional connection with anything I've written on the page. You should write, I highly encourage you to engage in some form of writing every day, if for no other reason than personal satisfaction. It's okay to be selfish with your reasons for writing. I think I need to be a bit more selfish with my own reasons for writing. I'm going to challenge myself to be more selfish with my writing and prioritize my personal satisfaction more when it comes to my writing. Hopefully this helped you analyze your journey with writing in a way you hadn't and ultimately helped you in some way.

Until next week, Happy Writing.