I write as a human, I write as a person.
A person is more than a body or a soul or the hylomorphic combination of the two. A person is an incommunicable being—one whose innermost thoughts and feelings will always be, at some level, unable to be fully communicated. And yet that doesn’t stop us from trying.
C.S. Lewis, in his masterpiece ‘Till We Have Faces (the book he thought was his most important, yet few people have read it), puts these words on the lips of the main character: “I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
Writing is about finding my voice, finding my face.
I write to give expression to inexpressible groanings, I write so that I can figure out what it is I think, I write so that I may forget.
I write because, deep down—even when it’s a painful process on the surface—it’s deeply satisfying, pleasurable even. It’s fun. At least when it’s good.
I always prefer the word person to individual because there can be individual pens, there can be individual iPhones, there can be individual employees. But to the extent that something is merely an ‘individual’—the part of a group that simply cannot be divided any further—it can still be replaced. Persons cannot. Each person is a universe of relationships, a subject, an infinite well. If my wife went missing and you gave me another “individual” who had all of her same characteristics, it would be no consolation to me. The person exists at a far deeper level. She is unrepeatable.
Writing is like this. It is personal.
The truth is a person. The truth is personal. The truth has a history—a heart, in addition to a mind. To the extent that writing captures the truth, it is personal.
I’m now about 25,000 words into my new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine: Coercion, Conformity, and the Courage for Truth, and it’s shaping up to be far more personal than Wanting because, in a world of A.I., it feels even more important to tell you about how formative those endless summers were on the sand dunes and shores of Lake Michigan, after which some of my classmates went back to school in the fall transformed—and others did not. An AI has never experienced that, and never will.
What happens to allow an experience to sink into the soul and change us? What moves a person to go from standing up against the wall at a party to dancing with reckless abandon? These are human questions. These are my questions. They have committed me to the insane task of writing 100,000 coherent words, strung together, between two pieces of cardboard.
There is a truth in the experiences I am writing about which I feel compelled to explore, to tell, to share. And that truth will bring me into relationship with other people whom I do not even know and have never met today—but two years from now, I will have shared a meal with some of them.
That is why I write.
In this computational age, the personal, the affective, is more important than ever. We possess the Capax Dei. The machines possess the Capax for Content.
Neither they, nor we, may ever use that capacity to the fullest. But we have a choice about what to fill it with. More content, or more X. You decide what X means to you.
Let’s talk craft for a moment, just a moment.
I see hundreds, actually thousands, of online writing courses popping up on the Internet. Nearly all of them involve some cohort based model that trains people on how to write consistently for an online audience (for engagement).
The creators have already solved the riddle of content-driven writing, and they will show you how to crack the code.
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived. My number one criteria in evaluating a piece of writing is not whether it solved my problems, but whether it opened me up to dive deeper into the mystery.
Where are the mystagogues? Writing is mystagogy. It is leading oneself, or others, into a great mystery. Their own lives are a mystery. It is a good place to start.
The normal and the everyday is a mystery, too. Yet few people have the eyes to see it that way. An attentive writer—one who is themself immersed in the mystery and sacramentality of it—can help them. (Please see my conversation with Thomas J. Bevan for more on this, if interested: Part I here, and Part II here. We called these conversations “Transcending the Translational”.)
I think there’s a massive bubble in “How To”, or didactic, content—content written by people who give the appearance that they’ve ridden off into the sunset and have come back into the cave to share what they’ve learned with the rest of us.
People are struggling, and the market is flooded with think pieces on whether inflation is real or the complexities of geo-politics. It’s interesting that the instinct is to try to make sense of every new thing that happens in the world (now that is a hampster wheel) rather than to understand the things that will never change.
Emotional reactivity disguised as pseudo-intellectualism is a powerful drug, but personalism is its antidote.
Writing an essay or short story or book is a personal project that directs our energy in one direction for a period of time. It gives me something to stay focused on, a north star, a vector for movement.
With that said, I’ve never written a book before with a 5-month old. She gives me both a sense of urgency, and a sense of childlike wonder.
She has been a good reminder to me of the thing that I love most about writing: it is an emergent process, and it offers opportunities for transcendence on a daily basis.
By transcendence, I don’t mean big mystical moments, giant leaps, moments of epiphany, religious experiences. I mean things which happen that pull us out of ourselves, and that completely change the direction of our writing—even of a single sentence.
I’ll hear a knock on the door of my study. Rome’s mom is there, waiting to bring Rome in to get a kiss from me. It’s a 1 minute “interruption”, but of course it’s not an interruption at all. It’s an opportunity.
No author should be the same by the time they finish a book as they were when they started. The same is true of a single essay.
This morning, I am no longer who I once was.
Time keeps flowing forward, and we are like children with noses pressed against the glass. And I think it would be good if we became a little bit more like children—it would be good and proper and pure—if we practiced making different faces, and writing on that glass in the mist left behind by our breath, speaking different words, trying to catch glimpses, looking at our reflection, and peering through that glass darkly.
C.S. Lewis’s character, Orual, was wrong: the gods do indeed love to hear us babble. Other people do too. All of Twitter (X) is just babble.
The interesting thing about babbling is that babies start out with the ability to babble all possible words in all possible languages; they eventually begin to focus it on one. If they don’t, their babbling never turns into speech.
In a similar way, our babbling is moving toward a singular expression, a word, a truth, which may take us millions of words to articulate but which can be grasped in a single moment of our life sometimes, in a world beyond speech.
And then those millions of words seem like straw. But the straw is a necessary humiliation for those of us who are learning to speak.
Postscript: Earlier this year, I woke up in the middle of the night and conceived the idea of holding a 3-5 day writing workshop in Saugatuck, MI, this summer for a handful of folks who want to come hang out and work on things that are important to them—with me and a small cohort of other creators. You’d have to come with something that you’re working on, and we’d wrestle with it together in real-time over good food and wine. As usual, I got ahead of myself. I realized that while I have the desire, I don’t have the time. At least not to do the organizing. So I am 50/50 on moving forward—if I do, I’d need someone to manage the logistics and operational side. Perhaps there’s someone in the Chicago area who reads this newsletter who would be a good fit. (Saugatuck is just a little over 2 hours away.) If you’re the right person, you know how to reach me.
“Nothing is as fascinating as the discovery of the real dimensions of one’s own ‘I,’ nothing so rich in surprises as the discovery of one’s own human face.” - Fr. Giussani
A friend of mine said recently, "If you're the only person who could have written it, then to at least one other person, it's the most important thing that's ever been written."