The Practice of Writing for Self-Reflection and Agency

Once more I feel inclined to write something about recovering time, focus and agency for ourselves. The very act of writing, and of writing something here, is a key part of that need. Writing, not an email, not a text message, not work notes, not a post or comment on other social media, but taking the time to write, just because, as an attempt to make time and reconsider things. This kind of writing ends up being recursive and self-reflective, and it’s no suprise that, from its early days, blogging implied a lot of blogging about blogging. Indeed writing about writing is, should we say, “a thing”. My guess is that it is “a thing” because unavoidably (perhaps?) non-instrumental writing (should we call it like that) reflects on itself as practice even when the subject matter may be something else.

The best writers, in my mind, are ‘writerly writers’, or those conscious of form and process, often to the point of fastidiousness. This is because this kind of writing, that often deserves the term of “literature”, is not merely phatic communication, fulfilling a ‘social function’ in pragmatic terms. I’d also say that writing that reflects on itself is also much more than an aesthetic practice. It is not merely about storytelling, pedagogy or distraction (“entertainment”). It is the result of an attempt to regain individual agency over one’s time and space, and over one’s ideas or should we even say “brain activity”. When you are writing, really writing, you are not doing anything else. Whether it’s my morning notes or blog posts such as this one, writing for the sake of it is quintaessentially “Me Time”.

Contemporary working cultures, often also described as “industries”, are the result of direct and indirect discplining and punishment- both literal and symbolic (discoursive) in nature. The goal needs to be clear, and almost always it needs to lead to “conversion”- writing as “content” needs to produce “engagement” which needs to “convert” into money in someone’s account somehow. This requires timetabling, scheduling, measurements. “The Quantified Self” concept extends itself to the counting of words per minute (as a teenager, I learned typing in huge, grey, cold metal mechanical typewriters- we had rulers to measure the number of characters we typed per minute). One must not only count the words, but publicise them- a competition with ourselves and against others. This has become zeitgeist: more is always better, but it needs to be announced; otherwise there is no participation in the public arena of fierce public competition as a mode of existence.

Instead, as with meditation, I keep going back to the practice of writing per se. Often this practice is no more than typing or handwriting. It is about taking time to making characters appear on the screen or page that hopefully make some sense (but they don’t have to). It is not, necessarily, for an other who might eventually read it (or not), though the practice always-already implies an act of hope- that someone somewhere will encounter those words and hopefully read them and consider them. But that is not a necessary condition of writing for the sake of it, because the goal here is to recover time and decision-making for the writer. It is about doing something else, that engages the brain in a different way, and that, in a way, produces nothing, does nothing, while doing something quite rare and valuable today, which is to give us back at least some time and space and agency- doing something because you wanted to (personally needed to), but not because someone asked you or expected you to.

And yes. An important part of self-reflective writing is the awareness or at least concern that the more writing there is out there the less it potentially matters or says to someone else.

N.B. This was written in one go and published immediately without any prior proofreading or editing. Light edits may (or not) take place to remove typos or errors following publication.