Writing is one of the best things that can ever happen to you.
You may get married, have kids, make lots of money, drive a nice car, and all the other external trappings of superficial success, but these events are nearly worthless until you tell someone about it.
Communication is the hallmark of the social animals of our planet. As you may have noticed, it’s these social animals who talk to each other who get the most accomplished on our world. Namely humans. When was the last time you saw a pack of beavers building a rocket to go to the moon? That’s right, never.
It’s true, there are other means of communication besides writing. There are the graphic arts, there is speech, and there is interpretive dance, but writing is by far the most specific, and the more permanent.
It is because of writing that specific information is preserved. Historically, we know more of the life and times of the ancient Roman Empire than the life of an average person in the Middle Ages. This is because the average person in the Roman Empire was more likely to be able to read and write than the average person in the Middle Ages.
The Romans had a higher level of literacy than the people who came a thousand years later. The ordinary grocery lists and love notes of the common people were preserved and can be read today because of writing.
In fact, writing is so intertwined with permanence that someone once said that all writing is an attempt to achieve immortality.
However, if the note that I wrote to the cute redhead in third grade lives forever, I think that I’ll be happy that I won’t be.
Possibly the greatest effort of writing is that of story. Storytelling has always been a heavyweight of culture, but when storytelling met with writing, it became unstoppable. With the introduction of written stories, we immediately enter the world of reading, a land where more can be said of it than can be written, or even read.
Nearly everything we ever learn has entered our consciousness because we have read it somewhere. Reading welcomes us into worlds we could never have imagined, but are now able to because the author has invited us in. We share the mind and intent of a writer when we read what he or she has written. In reading, we no longer live once; we live a thousand lives a thousand times, never to be fettered to this world.
In a way, writing is a form of public speaking, for when a writer writes, he can hold the attention of millions at a single time, guiding them in the way he sees the world, and for once, millions at the same time can see the world with the same eyes as the author. And then, at the end, the reader can make up their mind for themselves.
A writer is the most powerful person in the world.
A writer is anyone who has written today.
So go. Write. Read. Live. Breathe. Experience. Taste. See. Do. Be.
Now tell me, aren’t you glad you read this?
themadhairman 