Because writing is not the same as talking, thinking or doing.
It’s a different function, it comes from a different part of your brain–almost from a different person.
If you don’t write because you say that you “talk it out” enough, I understand–but don’t believe you or agree with you.
If you don’t write out your thoughts because “I had them in my head, I know what they are” then I’ll pretend to believe you, but won’t bother arguing.
If you don’t write because you “do what you’d write about anyway” then you haven’t written much about what you do.
Writing is not the same as talking or thinking or doing. It comes from a different place in your brain, even a different flavor of your thoughts and writing out your what you say will help you talk, think and do.
When writing, you might become a different person.
If we captured the dialogue of a group of 12-year old boys and plotted it on a chart, it might range from:
- PS4 to
- YouTube “stars” who play PS4 (and record their playing) to
- Which basketball shoes are the latest and greatest to
- Which Pokemon characters are worth walking 1 kilometer for.
But then he wrote his homework assignment which was something like, “A travel brochure for your teacher to visit Ancient Egypt–but to go actually go back in time.”
I read it and immediately copied some sentences and Googled them (in quotes so they’re exact) to check to see if this was copied and pasted from the Wikipedia entry on ancient Egypt. (It wasn’t.)
I’m not sure I recognized my son. When did he learn this vocabulary? These thoughts that came from his imagination via his brain through his fingers and onto the page, I don’t recognize them as anything he might say or think or do. But that’s just it: they’re not thing he would say or think or do, they’re words he would write.
They are almost four different personalities:
- Speaking
- Thinking
- Doing
- Writing
They can all co-exist. They might not agree with one another, they might argue, fight, even not believe the other personality, but they are all in there.
But how many of us make the effort to find that Personality #4? In my ridiculously biased opinion, I think that #4 helps to clarify the other personalities within us. Without #4, we might not even really understand the other three. Without #4, I dare to write, the other three are less “important” or at least less recognized.
In case you were wondering the answer to the question, “Why write?” That’s why.
Because writing is not the same as talking, thinking or doing.
