Reasons to write

It’s an idea I found in ‘Several Short Sentences About Writing’ written by Verlyn Klinkenborg.

"If you notice something, it's because it's important.
But what you notice depends on what you allow yourself to notice,
And that depends on what you feel authorized, permitted to notice"

I’m (mentally) adding it as one of the reasons for writing this blog. I permit myself to notice more, even if that means I only quote content I find online.

The book made me realize another reason for writing: internalizing information. I remember the first blog I wrote in 2019 on what I learned from studying Philosophy. Writing down my thoughts helped me remember it. There’s so much you read online and offline that disappears if you don’t do something with it.

The information in my first blog is still ready knowledge. It likely has to do with all the decisions that came about when writing the article.

“Every work of literature is the result of thousands and thousands of decisions.
Intricate, minute decisions—this word or that, here or where, now or later, again and again.”

This also applies to coding. It reminds me of how coding yourself gives you a mental model of the system you’re building. When you outsource it to a machine you lose that mental model. Each decision makes up your mental model of the writing you do. Whether that writing is words or code does not matter. They both convey a message. How that message is conveyed emerges once you start writing.

“Sometimes you know just what you want to say,
And you find the words to say exactly that.
But just as often what you want to say emerges as the sentence takes shape.
The thought isn’t primary or absolute.
The thought is only a hint.
Language offers guidance and resistance both.
The sentence becomes the thought by bringing it fully into being.”

The transformation of a thought into a sentence does more than you think. It permits you to notice, and helps you internalize information. And at some point, it might even support in forming a new thought. Once a thought appears as a sentence, it might not be as useful as you thought it was. But at least you did something with the information you consumed.