What It Means to Write

In the previous post, I talked about what it takes to write, and a brief recap would bring us to four key elements I’ve mentioned: awareness, patience, discipline, and courage. These four essential elements that a writer should have will be, however, for naught, if we lose track of the meaning and purpose of writing. I’ll talk about that today, though I did touch on that in brief, in the previous post.

To start, I will bring in, again, J.G. Ballard, with a brief quote about the writer:

We live inside an enormous novel… The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.

– J.G. Ballard

Ballard’s quote implies that reality is fiction, shaped by what our environment – the media materials, mostly – feeds us. Television shows, books, music, art, video games – these all have a hand in what we perceive to be real. Ironically, the implication that may be lifted from Ballard’s quote is that what is not real – the fiction – makes us determine what is real – the reality. Things get muddled up, of course, and ultimately we are left with a sense of disorientation. Meanwhile, we also have a quote from Gustave Flaubert:

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

– Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert’s quote implies a possibility in the variations of reality, focusing on what you, the writer, believe in. What you perceive to be the truth, and if your perception of truth weighs a lot for your reader, then it will help shape his or her truth, based on your fiction.

But what am I getting at? Whether or not your writing reaches an extremely huge audience, your writing will be able to affect the reader. Furthermore, what you write, if we consider Flaubert’s and Ballard’s quotes, will be responsible in helping shape reality and fiction, and perhaps cross or blur the lines between the two. In short, it means that writing is a huge responsibility.

We hear speeches from presidents, from key figures in the society. We’re glued to our television screens and celebrate the brilliant, witty, humanizing remarks of big figures like Taylor Swift, and react negatively to people who say something that goes against our beliefs and morals. We listen to speakers who are renowned in their respective fields. We read biographies and autobiographies, extol the virtues of individuals who are living our dreams. These are all texts, written by one or more people, and they affect us, even in the smallest of ways. We get inspired by the texts we read and experience. They stir something within us.

So here’s a neat list of what it means to write. Writing means that…

You must be willing to teach. Whether you’re teaching truths you believe in, or truths that have been passed down to you, values that you’ve picked up along the way, based on experience, writing means you will be handing down something valuable to your reader, in the form of a text. Writing means you will be augmenting the reader’s knowledge, or challenging what he or she already knows. If you know any teachers, you are probably already aware that they have a huge responsibility in their hands. Writing is one form of teaching, and being a writer means being a teacher.

What It Means to Write

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