Becoming Writer, Becoming Better Thinker

Arguably today, there is a massive decline on reading. Daily Times, in February 2020 gave a big headline, "Decline in book-reading culture!" Reflecting on the place I write, Indonesia, is rank second-last in reading interest and partly because of the infrastructures which foster the interest are not available widely like for instance, public library. Less established bookworm community, etc. Assuming people does not read as much, why we need to write then? There are several reasons why people write. The most common and basic is to communicate. Writing is one of a means of communication. Some people are better with written words rather than verbal. Some could say that great people did not write, somebody is writing for them. Especially today, many shadow writer than can help us to write. Book like panggil saya BTP is not written by Ahok himself but by BTP team. 

In this case, we can agree but we should not paint the whole thing with a same brush. True, that some great people did not write. On the other hands, some great people write and become somewhat immortals, through their works and written tenet of thoughts. People like Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, John Calvin, Martin Luther still speaks today, through their writing. They are all passed away, yet their words still echoes and resounding. Pramoedya Ananta Tour best to capture the greatness of writing whereby he argues that writing is the "work for eternity." No matter how smart and sly as a fox a person might be, the sprinkles of time will remove their intellectual trails, and all will completely gone with the wind of change. 

Why write? Why becoming a writer? For me personally, the reason I write, is to expressed my thought more precisely and organized my random and novel thoughts. Writing is like a recorder. We can track the progress of our own thought and mental life. Without writing, how can we measure that someone is growing in their thinking? This is true. We can say that John Calvin did not change a lot in his Theological thinking because the latest version of his institutes does not depart immensely from his younger self's Institutes. Young Calvin and Late Calvin is consistently God-Centered and focused much in Christian living. He expand his thought by discussing church polity but still, it does make a great deal of change in essential.

However, how about the gap between thinking and writing? In study of hermeneutics, Augustine had mentioned and also aware on how there is a gap between thinking and writing. Sometimes, the written text does not mean what the writer think about particular issue in mind. We can call this phenomena as Semiotics-Gap. This is normal, and should not be a major issue. We should not use this as an excuse not to write in fact, writing help us to articulate our thinking better. Even there is a semiotic gap, still, we can grasp the big idea behind the writing albeit we cannot be so certain for the specific details. Patrick Bahls once shared a testimony about how writing seemed to help his students to be more engaged, and gain a better conceptual understanding. Writing is proven to help and has given many benefits for people who suffer dementia. The activity of writing improve their cognition and memory. 

Jordan Peterson, the leading thinker of our time says that writing and thinking are always goes hands in hands. Becoming a good writer means becoming a good thinker. In line with Peterson, through writing, a thinker can formulate an informed and coherent and sophisticated set of ideas on something important.  When we make visible our thought through writing, we can be more attentive and aware with the flaws, fallacies and inconsistencies in our argument. Hence, writing is not just for the benefit of others, as people often thought of. Writing, essentially is for benefit of self. To improve our  own thinking. Interestingly, somehow, people who hold the idea of writing as equal to thinking, is the one will enjoy the act of writing. Writing create life to the people who write. Clock seems to stop, the writer is totally absorbed to the other dimension and soul satisfying. Personally, as my experiences tells me, writing is one of the activity that can make people forget about the existence of time. 

Brandon Sanderson, one of the greatest American Epic fantasy and science fiction novelist once says that aim of writing is primarily about writing itself. Writing is for writing. Albeit our writing was rejected by publishers for many years, he said that every writer should keep on writing and improving their writing. The only advice for writing for Sanderson is to keep on writing. That's 90% key of writing, or becoming  a writer. If we can summarize his advice in three words, we get this, Practice, practice, and practice. To write is to engage in thinking process, becoming writer is actually becoming better thinker. Let's start habit to write. We can start to write around 10 minutes or even 15 minutes a day and let see what happened after a month. Theo Pauline Nestor in his book Writing is My Drink shared a good and inspiring idea that we can start to practice today he wrote, "Do I spend fifteen minutes everyday checking email? Yes. Do I ever say I'm too tired or do not have time? No. But checking email is a passive activity. I do nothing but click and see what others have sent me, how others want me to use my time, my energy, my life. Writing is active. Writing is for me forging my own meaning."