Why Write?
The Mental Game
Reading time: 5 minutes, 26 seconds. It’s the silly season. Go for it!
punditman says…
When I’m about to play a tennis match, I often complain about some nagging injury before the action begins.
“Don’t expect much,” I sometimes quip to my opponent.
The aches and pains are real. The excuses are real too. And they serve a dual purpose. First, my cover story is in place before anyone can say, “Love fifteen.” My opponent may be surprised at how I manage to play through the pain, or they may see through my spin (couldn’t resist), but at least the thought is there to distract them.
So if I win, my opponent has just been beaten by a guy jacked up on Advil with a shoulder hanging by thin threads of sinew. And if I lose, well, my ego survives intact. (Of course you lost, it tells me. You were hobbling around on one foot half the time. Even Federer would’ve lost.)
The funny thing is, I don’t do the same thing when I write.
Until now.
This “newsletter” is not exactly setting the world ablaze (granted, it’s already on fire). Tortured metaphor aside, I’m also wondering if I should continue with it.
I currently have 128 subscribers and 332 followers. Now for the excuses:
I don’t seem to have the time to publish regularly enough to see the steady growth promised to those who do.
My PR Department of Me is a slacker.
Life happens, other priorities take over, etc.
Substack writers who put their work behind a paywall usually arrive here with built-in readerships: established writers, journalists, academics, and public figures. It’s hard to compete against that!
Some writers offer a mix of free and paid articles (I find there’s nothing more annoying than getting halfway through a captivating piece of writing only to run into a toll booth).
I’ve resisted putting any of my articles behind a paywall because I don’t want access dependent upon someone’s ability or willingness to pay. That said, I may enable paid subscriptions as an option for readers to support my work, while keeping everything free.
Meanwhile, the Buy Me a Coffee option remains available. I appreciate all donations, but I do not expect any.
What Drives Me?
Thus, while these op-eds and “think pieces” require an inordinate amount of time with very little compensation, I keep circling back. Why?
I must have an irresistible need to get ideas out of my head and onto the page. It’s an urge with real force behind it.
At a certain point in life, you accumulate enough knowledge, experience, and perspective that it feels like a waste to just leave it floating between your ears. There’s a sense of obligation to do something with it, whether anyone notices or not. Writing is but one avenue. So there’s that.
But what puzzles me is why so many other expressive people don’t seem to share this urge.
I often read comments on this platform and elsewhere from people who are obviously intelligent, articulate, engaged with information, and paying close attention to the world. They’re clearly capable of organizing their thoughts, often compellingly. And yet they don’t go beyond writing the odd comment.
I get that people don’t have time, or maybe writing is already part of their day job, or maybe they just need to get that one thing off their chest. Or, perhaps they feel that serious writing is increasingly pointless within an information ecosystem that rewards micro-expression as opposed to serious enquiry.
Then again, if anyone needed grist for the mill, what better timeline than this? We are literally living through a moment when truth itself is under multi-pronged assault. And that’s just one feature of a world that seems more bizarre by the day.
But while the volume of data and opinion on every imaginable subject is enormous, I dare say that careful thought, by comparison, seems in short supply. The ratio is whacked. Along with attention spans.
There’s also quite a gap between simply holding a belief and sitting down and building something original from scratch. To question your own assumptions, fact-check, research, edit, and edit again. And then shape it into something worth another person’s time. To put your name on it and stand behind it.
At the same time, I’m humbled by how prolific some writers are. Many write from a specific area of expertise, but still, their output is astonishing. I don’t know if their ideas arrive fully formed, but I know mine often require some time to percolate, probably because I don’t write within a single niche. Each of these posts is a journey of discovery, and I’m glad you’ve chosen to join me on these quests.
But, again, why do I feel I have to wrestle ideas into essays, while others, who seem more than capable, never do? I hope it's not that blasted ego again. 😉
***
I once asked my mom why a family friend became a United Church minister.
“He had a calling,” she said.
Funny. He never seemed like that kind of guy. Rational, practical, artistic, curious; not some holy roller, just the coolest minister ever. I don’t know if he had some dramatic, lightning-bolt eureka moment. Maybe it was just a persistent nudge that quietly refused to go away, leading him to a life of service in the way he best saw fit.
Where do such compulsions come from?
Charles Bukowski put it this way: “When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing, but because writing chose you.”
And yet in today’s distracted, attention-deficit culture, my writing impulse sometimes feels more like a curse than a yearning.
Substack is not the easiest environment in which to fetch eyeballs. Email is the emulsifier here that holds this edifice together, but getting people to subscribe, even for free, isn’t easy. Most of us are already drowning in email, along with a litany of digital disturbances competing for our mind space. If you’re like me, if it’s not mission-critical, emails get marked “read later” in your head, which often ends up being “never.”
Plus, emails still get stuck in spam or blocked altogether. This happens with some of my Substack subscriptions.
***
The payoff here isn’t the point. Actually, maybe the audience isn’t even the point. Kudos if you got this far.
Maybe for me, ideas don’t fully exist until I’ve wrangled them into something worth reading.
If true, then maybe the real question isn’t whether Punditman should continue writing on Substack or somewhere else. Maybe the real question is whether I can stop.
Now I’ll put the ball in your court. I’d love to hear your thoughts. What would you like to see more of, or less of, in this space? What works? What doesn’t? And what compels you to write, if and when you do?
Regardless, thanks for keeping the rally going!
Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed this article and want to encourage Punditman to keep going, you can buy me a coffee below. Every little bit helps!
You put your finger on it when you said it's a way of questioning your assumptions. But there's more to it than just the fact-checking and research (necessary as that substructure is). But more fundamental is the process of crafting the argument, for a (possibly hypothetical) interlocutor. The writing itself, the logic baked into it, forces you to think more clearly, and frees you of cant - both others' and your own.
And you won't get that if you're just churning out the daily 600 words from a position of expertise, or riffing to show your wordsmithery. Both knowledge and chops are necessary conditions, but it's the thinking that counts. For what it's worth, keep it up for your own sake. But the rest of us want it too!
If you find it fulfilling, stimulating, useful, keep on writing! It serves to keep you in the game, so to speak.
Maybe you won't be the Wimbledon Champ of Substackers, but who cares? I can tell you have something to say, so keep on serving it up. You may even surprise yourself and hit a few aces.
Good luck!