The School of Life — Why so Many People Want to Be Writers

With the rise of the Internet and its numerous free blogging platforms, the barriers to entry have crumbled for those who want to share their ideas and stories to the masses.

Take a look at Medium, Tumblr and the vast amounts of other platforms that allow you to share your thoughts, your creativity, your imagination and your beliefs for all to see.

At one glance, it’s great that they have provided the more timid, apprehensive and introverted crowd a channel to be able to speak up and share their wonderful perspectives and ideas with the world.

To be given a place where delivery of message had potential to explode and resonate with millions of people all over the world was unheard of only a few decades ago. Now, people share their thoughts, experiences and pictures of lunches in the blink of an eye.

The silent majority are finally able to contribute to the conversation. They’re able to create communities that would never have been possible without these online platforms.

The consequence, however, is that there is now no criterion or standard to be judged. Everyone can contribute their thoughts and perspectives, but as we all know, not all ideas are equal.

With no one to limit the amount one contributes or edit the content one wishes to create, it is hard to judge who you is worth listening to and what is worth investing your precious time in.

The rise of instant communication tools and social media platforms, has made everyone a writer, and everyone’s got a little something to say. Most of us just like to hear the sound of our own voices or see our words online. With all the noise and no signal, it can feel discouraging when your work seems to be comparable to shouting into the void.

The School of Life shared a video today that I found compelling. Why do so many people want to be writers?

Is it for the recognition? The fame? The money? The prestige? The love of literature? The desire to share an original and captivating story? The desire to replicate our admired writers?

You’d think that most people who want to become writers are driven by their love for literature and aspire to share unique stories and information with others all over the world.

You’d think that they’re motivated to receive recognition for their ideas and to be able to help those who are going through tough times by sharing your experience and wisdom.

The video asks you to contemplate the rise of interest in authorship from a different angle — one that penetrates deep into one of our hidden desires: a desire to be heard.

The longing one day to turn out a book — probably a novel or, less likely, an autobiography lies close to the center of contemporary aspirations. This is, at one level, a hugely welcome development, a consequene of widespread literacy, higher educational standards and a proper focus on the power of books to change lives.

But looked at from another angle, it may also, in private, be the result of something rather more desultory: an epidemic of isolation and loneliness.

The army of literary agents, scouts, editors and writing coaches testifies not only to our love of literature, but also, less intentionally, to an unaddressed groundswell of painful solitude.

Many of you might disagree with this statement. Many of you might be completely content with your life and might be writing for many other reasons. But how come some people have a burning sensation to write instead of speaking to other people about the ideas?

One reason I find that I enjoy writing more than conversing with others is because it is easier for me to sit down and think what I truly feel about a given topic, research the topic if I feel that I am misinformed or unaware and can take my time to formulate my thoughts without feeling like I have to say something to avoid an awkward silence with a companion.

But this video asked me to look a bit deeper into my reasons. There was another reason why I started to write, document my thoughts and emotions and decide to share them in the public sphere of the Internet.

I believed that no one cared about I wanted to talk about.

Reasons for wanting to write are multiple of course, but the structurally simplest option may also be the most pervasive: we write because there is no one in the vicinity who will listen.

We start to long to set down our memories and emotions on a page and to send them out into the wider world because our friends can’t be bothered to hear us, because our partners are preoccupied and because it’s been agonizingly long since anyone gave us an uninterrupted stretch of time in which we could be attended to with respect and attention — in short, because we are very lonely.

As I started developing myself and striving to improve my cognitive abilities by provoking interesting talks with my friends about topics like psychology, morality, philosophy and religion, I realized I felt more distant from them.

A lot of the conversations revolved around talking about people, the latest gossip, the recent trends on social media and drama between acquaintances. Many times throughout conversations, friends took out their phones and busily checked notifications, texted friends or scrolled through social media.

Of course, a part of it was my growing arrogance and haughtiness — wanting to show off my newfound knowledge, wanting to show them how much I’ve been learning, how productive I’ve been, and feeling like I needed to make up for my insecurities.

And I get it. People have different interests and might not enjoy talking about certain things. There’s also a time, place and mood for people to want to talk about “deeper topics”.

I’ve noticed that many people categorize topics that require a bit of strain to think and converse about as “deep talks”, and do their best to avoid it most of the time. They find these conversations rather strange and difficult to keep up with, so they decide to not even explore that territory.

But I realized I had a growing desire to learn, think and talk about numerous topics. Although gossiping and celebrity news were fun to talk about, I felt that I was wasting my time with the uneventful conversations.

Whenever I wanted to talk about something I felt that I could not turn to many friends who shared the same interests as me. Even if they did, it would happen spontaneously and sporadically. I wanted to talk and to listen, but there simply wasn’t a medium for me at the time.

Writing can be the presenting solution to a more poignant ambition beneath: to be heard, to be held, to be respected, to have our feelings interpreted, and soothed, to be known and appreciated.

To find a place like Medium where my thoughts could flow uninterrupted and I could take as much time as I need to come up with a coherent sentence, where my words could be properly analyzed on paper without fear of being misinterpreted or misconstrued, where I could have the full attention of a reader who has clicked onto my article with the desire to listen, learn and interact with my ideas…

To have an outlet like Medium to find a community full of people who think like me, who think differently, who are open-minded, who have radical opinions, who have freedom of speech, who have lived vastly different lives and come from all over the world…

It has been a blessing.

I can have all the “deep talks” I want here without feeling uncomfortable for the other person who does not want to engage with the topic at hand. I don’t have to feel like I have to talk about something I don’t want to talk about.

I can choose to read or listen to quality ideas from pieces of writing that are well-thought out and intentionally and carefully constructed.

I can listen to the writers who want to be heard, and I can be heard as a writer who wants to be listened.

Despite all of this pessimism about writing, the video ends with a more optimistic perspective. Maybe the problem lies in us, expecting and wanting too much from the people around us. Maybe the problem is in the people around us, who are too busy with their lives to fulfill our desperate need to be listened to and be loved.

But it’s never too late to cultivate new friendships that may satisfy your hunger for meaningful and interesting conversations. You can always improve the current position you are in. There is no excuse to blame your friends for not being interested in what you’re interested in and being all bitter about it.

If we put in a little more effort to listen to each other, maybe we all wouldn’t feel like we aren’t being heard, feeling neglected and ultimately having to find solace writing on a piece of paper in solitude.

Even if we find literature the finest of substitutes, infinitely better than anything else yet invented, it still pays to recognize that substitute is what it might primarily be, that writing is in certain ways an act of very polite and artful revenge on a world too busy to listen and that we would never develop such fierce bookish ambitions if we ad not first been let down by those we needed so much to rely upon.

A slightly more conscious awareness of writing as compensation may lend us energy to acknowledge our unrequited ache for more visceral forms of contact. Whatever the satisfactions of writing alone is bed, we should perhaps not cease so easily to give up on the ecstasies of mutual understanding and sympathy.

It is far from easy to write a decent novel; it may be even harder, yet ultimately more rewarding, to learn to locate a circle of true friends. A better world might, from this perspective, be one in which we wanted a little less ardently to be writers — because we had collectively grown ever so slightly better at listening and making ourselves heard.

Literature’s loss might, in the end, be humanity’s gain.