Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand this morning. Have you ever had the thing happen where you are completely sure you understand something — until somebody asks you to explain it, and the whole thing falls apart in your mouth? You knew it a second ago. Now you are standing there.
So where did it go? Or here is the harder version: did you ever actually have it?
You are in a queue at the bank. The person in front of you is already on the phone, explaining exactly what they want, and they are repeating themselves because the phone signal is bad. They sound like they are rehearsing it in their head, word for word, to make sure they say it right. You look at your watch.
You have the idea in your head. You could speak, but you wait. You could start speaking, then stop. You could say it out loud to the person behind the counter, but you do not.
You hold it. You look at your shoes. Fair enough. That is what we usually do.
We write things down to remember them. We write a list so we do not forget the milk. We write an email so the recipient knows we sent it. We write a decision down to record the fact that we made it.
But there is a trap in that. If you write to remember, you are not thinking. You are just typing down what you already know. You are not allowed to remember yet.
The idea is not real until you try to put it into words. You try to say it out loud to the air, or you try to type it on a screen, and you realize you do not know what the first word is. You have to pause. You have to look at the screen and wait.
You have to stare at the cursor blinking at you. That pause—that gap where the idea dies or grows a new limb—is where the thinking happens. I have spent years trying to explain this to people. I write a lot.
I write about architecture and people and the way buildings smell in the rain. I write to learn. I write because my fingers have to move before my brain has finished the work. When I sit down to write, I am not a reporter.
I am not someone who has a finished sentence in my head and is just copying it onto paper. I am a person who has a vague feeling, a shapeless worry, and I am trying to see if it can survive contact with a sentence. I write alone because no one else can see the gap where I have to invent the bridge. This episode is about that gap.
It is about why you cannot write with an audience in the room, and why the words you just typed are not a record—they are a test.
Writing is essential to people like me, who write to learn. When I write I think much more carefully because there is an observable yet often overlooked gap between the time when I get the idea "in the moment" of what I want to write (i.e., the time when something comes up in my head) and the "moment my fingers start to realize" and function, process the information, and eventually put it together, usually, first, in a series of alphabets into words morphing eventually into sentences. That delay is the space where a good idea dies. If I try to write something down instantly, I am just copying thoughts from my brain to the page.
But if I wait for my fingers to catch up, I have to force the idea to survive the journey. I have to make it clear enough to put into words. By the time my hand moves, the thought has been tested. You have to do it alone.
You can get someone to help you with proof reading, editing, and revising what you have written. But when you write, you write it alone. No original idea worth spreading, reciting, and thinking about, can come from other people telling you what to write. If you write for an audience, you are lying to yourself.
To put it simply, by thinking that there'll be someone reading your work, you are automatically doing injustice to the ideas that are flourishing inside your head by consciously (and sometimes unconsciously) censor them because you have an anxiety toward the reception of your audience. You start deleting the parts that are messy or weird. You start polishing the parts that are safe. You are not finding truth; you are performing.
I write because I think of writing as a friend who always spare me his profound silent words. This friend whom I call writing is always helpful in being a prolounger, a mediator -- and a mediator -- of an act of immature thinking, which I often arrive at without his kind and critical help. You might know the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. He spent his life asking what it means to be free.
He spent a lot of time watching people pretend they are not free. He called this faking yourself out "bad faith". He saw people in cafés acting like the waiter. The waiter played a role perfectly, too perfectly, because he was afraid to admit he could choose to be anything else.
He was hiding behind his job. Writing is the same as that waiter, but for your thoughts. When you write for an audience, you are acting the role of the writer. You are performing the part of the person who knows what they are doing.
You are in bad faith with yourself. You are censoring the thought before it ever gets a chance to be born. So, why do I write? I write to find out what I actually think.
I write to test the idea. If the idea survives the sentence, then it is real. If it dies on the page, then I never really thought it to begin with. I am walking in a dark tunnel.
The writing is the only light I have. I am looking back at the path I walked on. I only know it is a path because I have walked on it. So many people that I know write something, and then re-write what they have written something entirely the next day -- either by themselves or because of the comments they receive from their peers.
Why is that the case? My theory is that when you get too absorbed into something, say, writing, the part of your mind that helps you perceive other things around you get shut off. When it comes to academic writing, once that part of your mind get shut off, your writing becomes incomprehensible. That is the trap.
You are so busy looking at the words that you stop looking at the world. You stop living. You write in a tunnel. And that is why it is dangerous to write with an audience watching.
You close off the world. You close off the truth. You are just playing a game of pretend.
In the same way that fieldnotes may have done for ethnographers who use their notes to record what they have learned each day from the field, I write because I think of writing as a friend who always spare me his profound silent words.
This friend of mine, writing, helps me think twice before making any conclusion, without doing the justice to the data received through my unfortunate and imperfect cognition." So, if you are a manager deciding on a hiring package, or a doctor writing a referral, do not write the decision down while you are still talking to the people involved. Write it first, while you are alone. Put the decision on paper, and see if the numbers and the names survive the journey from your head to the page. If you try to write while you are under pressure, or while someone is waiting for an answer, your writing will be incomprehensible.
You will see a path, but you will lose the footing. The part of your mind that connects one sentence to the next shuts down when you are too absorbed in the outcome. You get tunnel vision. You write what you meant to say, not what is actually there.
This is why I feel like I am walking in a dark tunnel when I write a dissertation. I have the experience of daily life, the data, the things I have seen, but I cannot see the way forward. I cannot see the structure. I am stumbling in the dark, waiting for the light.
Writing is the torch. It turns the darkness into a path, but only if I walk it alone. When you write, you are not recording a thought you already had. You are finding out whether the thought is strong enough to stand on its own two feet.
You are testing the idea against the sentence. If it survives, you have a decision. If it falls apart, you have learned something, and you can go back to the queue.
Writing this blog is different for writing dissertation, and someone the feeling of accomplishment I may get from writing this blog might psychologically substitute what I "should" be doing. But, hey, still, I don't think that which is the reason why I write. Here, to explain my self, I would like to resort to a metaphor: during the past few months of dissertation writing, I have been feeling as if I had been walking in a rather dark tunnel without a torch.