Why Write? Why Now?

If you are a writer or want to write, you have probably had many doubts circle in your head. Every writer feels them. It doesn’t matter whether you are a seedling still waiting to sprout or have written several books.

All writers I know have doubts. It just seems to be part of being an artist, to one degree or another. And one of the age-old nagging feelings that often comes up is this sense of “What’s the point?” What’s the point of writing when everything under the sun has already been talked about?

As highly sensitive and highly creative people, we can often feel a bit shaky.

What is it that we have to offer? Aren’t we saying the same old things? Aren’t we, in fact, saying obvious things?

I think the answer to these doubts is many-layered.

First of all, what’s obvious to us is not always obvious to other people. As writers, we spend so much time thinking about what we are writing that after a while, everything starts to feel very obvious.

But what’s obvious to you is most probably not obvious to others. They haven’t spent as much time thinking as deeply about this topic as you have.

And even if you are writing about those “same old things,” you are writing them from your own prism. You are someone new in the world, living life at this exact point in time, seeing all these changes in the world that no one else has seen before.

The thing is, even when Shakespeare wrote, everything under the sun had already been written about. In a general sense, all fear and hope and joy and sadness have been the same all through the ages.

And yet, we still need someone to write about our particular kind of joy and our specific strain of sadness. Those haven’t been talked about before. Those are things we are still understanding.

And in today’s world, there is an even more compelling reason to write.

I read Anne Janzer’s Writing Practices newsletter recently, and she articulated it so well that I felt like I had to share it.

Check out Anne’s website here. It’s a great resource for writers!

This is what Anne said in her newsletter:

“There’s a more urgent reason: By amplifying common sense ideas with your own slant, you give reality a boost in the online world.

A surprising number of people look online for accepted facts, without checking sources carefully. (“Just Google it!”)

Truth needs a boost because false stories spread more easily.”

What Anne says bears repeating!

Truth needs a boost because false stories spread more easily.

Anne goes on to tell us:

“Researchers from MIT Media Lab and MIT Sloan analyzed the spread of both verifiably true and false stories on social media—specifically Twitter. They found that the false posts “diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information.” Political falsehoods led the pack in propagation.”

Now, we might be tempted to blame Twitter bots for this — the accounts managed by software that post and retweet content on Twitter based on algorithms.

But no, it turns out that the these researchers discovered that the bots were, on the whole, unbiased. They propagated both true and false stories at the same rate.

The problem with spreading lies is a human one.

Anne goes on to say:

“The problem is a human one. False news often inspires emotions like fear, disgust, and surprise. The truth is generally less surprising. It draws less attention, fewer clicks.

Here’s another important thing to know about human beings:

People expect to see true statements more often than false ones.

This general tendency is part of the illusory truth effect. We’re more likely to think something is true if we’ve seen or heard it a lot.

The problem with the spread of false news is that over time, the more we see it, the truer it seems.”

That’s kind of mind-blowing, isn’t it? The more we see a lie, the more we think it is the truth.

As highly sensitive writers, we make a difference every time we express the truth.

It doesn’t matter whether we are writing fiction or nonfiction. All great writing talks about things that are not often talked about.

Haven’t we read a story that suddenly made us feel less alone?

The writer of this story has said something true, something we usually haven’t heard people talking about. They’ve made us feel more seen, less alone.

So, as writers and bloggers, we have our part to play in creating a bigger narrative, a bigger story. We can, as Anne says, “amplify true stories” and write about the truth from our own perspective. When we share online, we can be conscious of checking our sources before we share articles and stories.

This is Anne’s call to action, and I hope you and I can rise up to it.

“The truth needs a boost. We can all do our part.”

The truth is less surprising. The truth is less sticky.

And we need the truth.

How can we play our part in boosting it?

P.S. Find the press release about this study on the MIT website. Read the study itself in Science Magazine.