What Is Writing?

Playing with Alphabet Soup

Let’s start with what it isn’t. A good way to make a buck. A hack for getting famous. A legitimate option if you have any other.

Writing is inevitable. It is poetry, a path to lead you out of life’s mazes, a roundabout but elegant way home. It is mind reading and time travel. Writing is saying what needs to be said when no one is willing to say it. At least not the way you will.

Writing is the art of turning sound into meaning. It is story and song, life itself unfolding through the power of words. It is speech but on paper, language but with cadence. It is contracts and applications and other forms of going mad.

Writing is thinking out loud (but usually done silently). It is shared isolation—an act of spiritual necessity that bids one to do their duty. It is both humility and an act of daring greatness.

Sometimes, it is a way to get approval. But often, it feels more like a shout into the void. Occasionally, you hear a few echoes, and you live for those, but soon there is silence again and it’s time to keep going.

Writing is what we do when we don’t know what to do. It is how we speak when talking fails. It is a form of understanding, a ritual. Prayer.

Writing is human. It is the legacy we leave, the message we carry, the cause we champion—a veritable crucible of thought and emotion, distilling things down to their most honest essence.

Of course, writing isn’t any of those things. Not really. It is only a string of symbols we mistook for something serious. Playing with alphabet soup. The real secret is not what it is but what we do with it—how it feeds us and perhaps, maybe eventually, even others. What, then, is writing?

Hell if I know.

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© 2024 Jeff Goins
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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