Potato is yum

I started this post a few days ago. I started getting into it and then realized I was biting off too much for a Sunday night. So, here we go. I’m gonna go through my journey of becoming a writer and why writing is a skill people should practice even if they don’t intend to publish anything.

The core of Writing is that it’s a form of communication. The whole communication thing is a massive topic on it’s own with people literally getting PHDs on the topic. In fact, many people have dedicated their whole lives to investigating how communication has developed. Writing is one of these method people use to communicate. So like why am I going all the way back to such an abstract topic? Well because I gotta frame writing as a skill in a way that shows the skill has a wide application. Writing is a written form of language where someone thinks up an idea, puts it down into symbols and pictures that another human being also recognizes. The other human being decodes the symbols and pictures and hopefully has the same image in their mind as the writer.

Hopefully. That’s rarely the case. You see, when we first start writing and communicating in general we all learn it in different contexts, in different ways, at different times. No interpretation of a set of scribbles on a page will be the same for any human being. This truly hits at the heart of writing. You can write “I like potatoes” and everyone will see the phrase “I like potatoes”. But if you take any part of this phrase on it’s own it is nonsense. “like potatoes” is clearly different than “I like potatoes.” If you add a question mark to the end the meaning changes once again. If you put “like potatoes?” it’s as if you’re asking someone if they like potatoes. Now if you are in person and talking to someone, micro expressions, hand gestures, body angle, eye movement, and so much more convey context to the listener for your communication.

When we talk to people we don’t often realize just how much information we are sending. The reason? We do a majority of this communicating by habit. Because that’s how we learned it. That’s how the people around us talked so that’s how we talk. There’s a big issue with this. Nobody sees you when you write. Nobody gets the context or the micro expressions. I could say “I like potatoes.” but if I add some words to say “Damn. I reaaaaaally like potatoes.” it goes from a statement to a sarcastic statement. In fact, it’s often difficult to tell through text if someone is sarcastic or not because the biggest indicator for sarcasm is the delivery.

I made a post earlier about Satire where I complained about this exact issue. It’s difficult to convey an idea that you purposely sidestep for greater effect. So why does all this matter? Because at the end of the day, writing is about packing up your ideas in a neat little package and giving it to someone else so that another human can open it up and see a similar thing to what you saw. Why similar? Because it’s impossible for someone to get the same vision as you. So what is writing? Why do you want to get better at writing? What does writing do to you communication that helps you do better in life?

I started writing to self publish books three years ago. Two failed books. A few failed small short stories. A recently released serial. I’m by no means an expert at this whole writing thing. I’m just your average guy that goes to work, goes to university, gets back to my room and then plays games for two to three hours before conking out on the bed. So how could writing improve my life so significantly? So significantly that I would recommend everyone try to learn to write. It comes down to improvements in writing improving my communication skills.

In highschool, I struggled to write emails. What should I say? This? That? How do I get what I want? I struggled to hold a basic conversation. I chalked it up to not being interesting enough. I was a boring person. But no. I live a full 24 hours a day. I’m sure I got something to say. So what was the problem? I couldn’t figure out a way to put what was in my head into a form that other humans could process. I became an “introvert” and “lonely” not because I didn’t want to talk to people or share ideas but because I was incapable of encoding my thoughts into these strange sounds and symbols that we use to converse.

So what does writing provide? It provides a foundation and a steel frame for you to pour your concrete into to build that building. During highschool I started doing debate and learned about the structure of an argument among other argumentative devices. From this framework, I was able to adapt the skeleton I was handed into something I could use personally. The idea of claim, solvency, advantage, and more lay out the groundwork for sharing a much bigger idea into smaller parts that are easier to hit. By continually breaking down writing you end up at a point where you realize you can assemble whole arguments with much less thought on how to structure it. It simply removes the effort from one part of the process that doesn’t require much effort as people have worked on this whole language thing for centuries. Why reinvent the wheel?

Before I started practicing writing as a daily thing I would often have to pause conversations to figure out what I was trying to say. The phrase, “what I mean is -” ended up becoming something that came out of my mouth almost every ten minutes. After about three months of writing I realized how ridiculous this was. If I meant to say something, why didn’t I just say what I meant to say? Like if I said it right the first time wouldn’t it not only be faster for me to convey ideas it would also be easier for someone to understand me. So over the past three years my use of “what I mean is” has gradually dwindled to becoming an almost nonexistent phrase.

A lot of people think that writing is about the repertoire of words at your disposal. However, I don’t really think so. Good writing cares more about the clarity and ability to convey the idea rather than fancy words and flourishes. It’s like the example of the boxes I gave in my post on Sunday. You can give someone an idea packaged in a neat little box or you could put it in a giant purple box with a velvet lace keeping the package from bursting in a pile of wasteful packing peanuts. Also bad would be throwing your idea into a paper bag and handing a crumpled mess of… something. Writing well presents and conveys the thoughts well. It encodes the ideas into something that is easily digestible in a manner that is appropriate for the situation. I feel like writing didn’t really increase my vocabulary. It did how ever give me a deeper understanding of more words leading to me using more words in a deeper more fundamental level which gives the illusion of increase vocabulary. Knowing more words means you can use more nuanced definitions of words to convey varying messages by simply changing a word. More complex words is the same as micro expressions and hand gestures for speech.

Overall, doing writing has greatly improved my life and I wish I had started earlier.

Ah. Here’s the post plan

• Media Review
• RRCM Finished
• Side Project Book (It’s Satire!)