Discovery by Writing
Some of us are compelled to write and we write, whatever the reason—letters to friends, college papers, business letters, newspaper articles. But when I began writing for myself, I discovered the intriguing reality that one learns what one really thinks by writing. It’s as if one’s feelings and perhaps even one’s philosophy crystallize and become apparent in the process of making words that fit. Or as Richard Cohen suggests in his book How to Write Like Tolstoy, perhaps the act of writing “releases thoughts that have not been on the conscious level.”
I began writing long before my thirteenth birthday when I was given a typewriter and laboriously taught myself to type. After my family moved away, I typed long letters to my best friend in Evanston.
After college I worked in New York for ten years, in public relations. I loved researching and writing press releases, albeit after office hours and on weekends so that I could perform my normal job of compiling endless lists and keeping several busy account executives organized. It mattered to me not a bit that my name didn’t appear on the pieces or that I researched the subjects and wrote on my own time. I was elated simply to carry out the assignments.
Traveling in Europe with a boyfriend, I noted our different approaches: when we encountered anything unusual, he would try to figure out how it worked but I, not caring the least how it functioned, immediately began trying to describe it, silently, in my mind.
Later in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I fell into the dream job of writing for a newspaper. Working under the exacting editor, I then, for the first time, felt I was doing something that fit me perfectly. The work was exhilarating and demanding, and I remember at first distinctly feeling that I knew what I wanted to say but the words got in the way. Eventually they ceased to obstruct.
I also realized that writing gave me something of my own, something I could do for pleasure and intellectual fulfillment as much as for pay. I would always have writing as a source of joy…the pure pleasure of putting words together.
As to discovery by writing, it perhaps came in stages. At college, we had to answer a single question during the two and a half hours allotted for a final exam. This exercise required synthesizing what we had learned in a way to produce new knowledge for each of us personally.
Later, when I moved to an island in Lake Michigan to raise Angora goats and write for myself, I took this discovery further. I was struck suddenly time after time, pausing mid-sentence, that I had a new realization, perspective, or understanding than I had previously. It might be something rather ordinary but surprisingly different and usually more insightful than my former view.
So I will continue to write and be surprised by new thoughts. I’ll perhaps write more about goats, more than my previous book, Goat Song, and more than the novel for middle-grade students still in manuscript form that has to do with goats. I’ll surely write more about animals but will also pursue other interests—Romanesque architecture in France, Spain in the 10th Century, the weaving cultures of Guatemala, the challenge of new languages. And simply by putting what I’m learning into words, I’ll discover new perspectives and perhaps more insightful understanding than I can glean from merely reading books, conducting interviews, or making observations.
