The Things You Don't Have to Write

Bad Moral Writing Habits, In No Particular Order

A weekend bonus on keeping sane, thinking well, and writing helpfully.

The proliferation of writing online is, I think, making visible what has always been the case: there are great writers and thinkers working in all corners, and that, in the past, most of them were unknown. I’m reminded of figures like Emily Dickinson, who published ten poems of 1,800 in her lifetime, and wonder what would have happened to her if something like the Internet existed to publicize her work at the push of a button.

It’s actually an interesting exercise, come to think of it. I’d love to say that she would have been more well-known, more celebrated in her own day, but the truth is that she would have had to compete with the 19th century version of clickbait, be appreciated by a few friends, and have her work lapse into complete anonymity eventually. Perhaps the fact that she wasn’t known, her loss of immediate glory—this is part of why she’s celebrated and remembered. To publish in one’s own day is to take your shot, and hope that someone hears something. But it’s not a guarantee that the clickbait won’t win.

The possibility of an audience that awaits anyone by means of the Internet means that someone like a Dickinson can have an audience, but also that she has to win against Buzzfeed as well. I’d love to say that good writing finds its audience, that thoughtful things win out in the end, and that noisy drums and flashy sirens aren’t actually what will be remembered. But I don’t honestly think that’s true.

So.

If the odds are stacked against a writer, and the chances are high that they’ll sink into obscurity after having done good work, why do it? Why think hard, or write carefully? Why put good words down or dig into thoughfulness? Part of the answer is that it’s good for its own sake—the cultivation of wisdom is its own reward. But part of the answer is that, on occasion, something careful and well-thought out will sift through the detritus and be taken up once the future realizes that there were uncut gems waiting in the past.

In the interest of creating less detritus, and giving the future more gems to find, I propose three writing habits to avoid. I have no magic words on what makes a writer better—some loose ideas, but mostly they’re a collection of insights arrived by negation, by moving past those things which are to be avoided.

In no particular order:

1. Writing For An Audience. To presume to write for an audience is folly, insofar as I have no idea who will pick up my words and find delight in them. I have no access into a reader’s mind any more than I have access into the minds of people I see regularly. What I know of my children and my wife comes from practice, from dialogue, not monologue likes essays are. To write “for an audience”, then, is to write for the idea of a person, for an ideology that you hope to cleave to. This is a sure-fired, tried-and-true way to make your writing predictable and partisan. Your audience, in turn, conforms to that vision, for connecting with you means finding themselves in your words. In the end, both writer and audience conform to an image that neither of them really are.

Just write what’s in you to write. Connect the dots as you find them. But for the sake of yourself and your readers, don’t write for your audience. Let them overhear your thinking, but don’t presume an ideal that you and your audience will soon find yourself conformed to, caricatures that no one person created.

2. Writing To Destroy. Let me tell you this secret: bad things persist, perhaps for a long time, and they persist even when good people speak out against them. The answer is not quietism, but to say the thing, and then move on to doing something different. Every age has had writers whose sole purpose was to take down Bad Things, and this is not always wrong in and of itself: Sinclair Lewis and Ida B. Wells are the exemplars here.

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   But a cottage industry which has sprung up around what we can just call the “WTD” motif, and it doesn’t matter what the recent Bad Thing is: white nationalism, evangelicalism, white nationalist evangelicalism, blood sausage, white evangelical nationalist blood sausage. The target is moving and often amorphous, ill-understood and robustly discussed. And the more it’s discussed, the more insistently that it must be a thing to be discussed, even if no one knows what it is, or more importantly, what to do about it. To be aware of something is to see it, and it’s hard to say that Sinclair Lewis, in his granular approach to beef-packing plants, is in the same neighborhood with most writing today about evangelicals, nationalism, or blood sausage. For Lewis saw the plants, lived in the plants, and ultimately, loved Chicago. It’s hard to say whether that is true in most cases.

Write because something is good, and you want to know it well. Write because something is wrong, and you have a small sense of what is wrong, and want to be curious about more of its wrongness. But above all, write because you care about your topic. Write on bad things, but because you care about good things.

3. Writing Against. Much like the first two, writing against things presumes that we have an identifiable target in which nothing good could be. It supposes two roads in the woods, divergent and irreconcilable. And yet, they are both in the same woods, and they are both roads. That they are going somewhere is what makes a road a road, and on roads, there is always the possibility of turning around. But if Writing To Destroy operates in a mode of total critique, writing not out of love but out of anger, Writing Against operates in a mode of incuriosity and impatience.

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   Writing Against sees that there are two roads, and then bundles the road and the traveler together, and worse, conforms the writing to this confusion as well. The argument becomes confused first, and the writing follows, trading less in thinking now than tropes, presuming quick solutions that are mirror images of the problem. Saying “I don’t think this is true” doesn’t mean that all of what is untrue needs to go, that the answer is to replace poisoned dirt with concrete. Subtlety is the fruit of patience, and Writing Against is born of impatience, of doing away with something before we have a sense of what worse thing awaits us in its absence.

Write because, when something is wrong, we are not clear about what exactly is wrong. Wrongness is complex, for while evil is fairly simple in its nature, it occurs in and through people and systems and histories, all of which are more than the sum of the parts. And so, writing about such things requires our attention and our patience.

If I were to give a classical name to the three vices above, they would be 1) envy, 2) anger, and 3) sloth. The first is driven by the desire to be seen and appreciated like others, the second to destroy all of where the wrong is, and the third driven by not caring enough to be curious about what is wrong. When seen this way, the phenomenon of bad Internet writing is a species of something Christians have been tossing around for centuries. Sometimes, it’s not that complicated.