Column: The clarifying power of writing and storytelling

Reflections on why we write — and why we share our writing with the world

I. On writing

One night in the spring of 1874, two years into his second term in the White House, Ulysses S. Grant was stuck. As historian Ron Chernow recounts in his biography of America’s eighteenth president, Grant was struggling to decide whether to sign a bill to boost the amount of paper currency in circulation to combat an economic downturn. He was wary of the bill’s consequences but under enormous political pressure to sign it.

After a sleepless night, he met with his cabinet to announce his decision. “The night before,” as Chernow describes it, Grant “had resolved to sign the inflation bill and sat up late drafting an accompanying message, listing his most cogent arguments. But the more he wrote, he said, the more specious his own arguments sounded.” All night, Grant continued to put pen to paper, exploring the best arguments he could muster for and against the bill. Chernow captures the scene: “The more he wrote that night, the less he was persuaded by his own reasoning. Finally, he thought, ‘What is the good of all this? You do not believe it. You know it is not true.’”

So, Grant signed the bill anyway, right? He’d already invested time and energy into getting it passed. He certainly had a lot of people expecting he’d sign it. He was under significant pressure, and he had plenty of other tasks on his to-do list, like trying to hold together a nation reeling from a bloody civil war. It would’ve been far easier just to sign the bill and move on. But he didn’t. Instead, Chernow writes, “he tore up his message, tossed it into the wastebasket, and decided to veto the bill.”

Grant lived an epic life. Why highlight this one seemingly insignificant moment? Why focus on a brief anecdote that commands only a couple of the thousand-plus pages Chernow gives him? In part because, as Chernow writes, it was “an impressive display of Grant’s intellectual honesty, candor, and exemplary courage.” But it’s more than that, at least in one particular way. In this anecdote, we see Grant consciously make time to think deeply about a single challenging issue. We see him reflect on it before acting. We see him consider his own biases and inclinations. We see him explore his own values and beliefs.

I’m projecting a lot of thoughts on Grant here. No one knows exactly what he was thinking that night. But it’s hard to imagine anyone making such a difficult and contentious decision without a process of deep reflection and keen sense of self-awareness — a process enabled and accelerated by the simple act of writing. It was through writing that Grant discovered what he truly felt about the bill on his desk. It was through writing that Grant found the clarity to make the decision that best aligned with his values. It was through writing that Grant figured out what he truly thought and believed.

***

These days, as notifications and requests bombard our screens and inboxes, and as information, distractions, and stimuli assault our brains, the peace of mind Grant found that night feels ever more elusive. Think about the last time you needed to work through something challenging — preparing for a difficult conversation with a friend, say, or making a choice about the next step in your career. Did you work through it carefully and methodically? Or, like me, did you fit it into a few spare minutes between meetings and emails and other short-term obligations? When was the last time any of us found the mental stillness to explore an idea or arrive clearly and confidently at a decision?

There are plenty of techniques for building awareness and creating space to think. At a practical level, for instance, we might turn off notifications on our phones or build a meditation practice or schedule a recurring calendar event for “Time to think.” More philosophically, we could try to tackle the compulsion that so many of us feel to be busy and stressed all the time, or we might make a concerted effort to fight FOMO — the notorious “fear of missing out” — that infects so much of how we spend our time. If mental clarity is what we’re after, though, perhaps we might consider a more old-school approach to making sense of things: writing.

One of Grant’s predecessors, Abraham Lincoln, took to heart not just the power of the written word, but the power of actually writing the words. As Joshua Wolf Shenk recounts in Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, while the sixteenth president “often spoke extemporaneously over the course of his career, most of the great works of his mature years were composed on the page. Going through many drafts, he worked out his thoughts by writing and rewriting.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy is a powerful collection of essays on race and politics written throughout the Obama administration. But it’s also a moving chronicle of his own growth as a writer. In the book, Coates describes how he views writing as a way of understanding and communicating with the world. “Writing is always some form of interpretation,” he observes, “some form of translating the specificity of one’s roots or expertise or even one’s own mind into language that can be absorbed and assimilated into the consciousness of a broader audience.”

Writing can be many things, from a mechanism to influence public opinion to a way to earn a living to, as Coates puts it, a technique to transmit personal experience into the public discourse. In these instances, writing is a means to an end. But sometimes the act of writing is both the means and the end itself. Sometimes it’s just a tool to make sense of the thoughts and ideas bouncing around in our brains. A tool to process the endless complexities of life. To bring some order to our questions and doubts, anxieties and inclinations, by distilling them on the page. Writing, as Daniel H. Pink writes (of course) in When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, “is an act of discovering what you think and what you believe.” Writing empowers us to transform mental fragments into coherent philosophies, and to communicate them to ourselves and the world.

In an age when typing more than a text message or tweet can seem daunting, it’s easy to forgot how fulfilling — or simply relieving — it can be to transfer what’s in here (the mind) to out there (the page in front of us). It’s liberating to finally articulate on paper the fleeting strands of a thought or notion that has been ricocheting around one’s head, consciously or not, for who knows how long. “Write a bit, just for yourself,” urges Lin-Manuel Miranda in his tweet-inspired book, Gmorning, Gnight!: Little Pep Talks for Me & You. “Give that maelstrom in your head a place to land. Look @ everything swirling around in there!”

II. On storytelling

When it comes to processing the world, reading — and consuming content generally — can be just as liberating. I’m convinced that one of the most magical moments a person can experience is to encounter writing, whether a single sentence or an entire book, that captures something we’ve been thinking or feeling but haven’t quite been able to articulate. Like the act of writing itself, finding the right piece of content at the right time doesn’t just convey information. It also brings clarity to the world and offers us a better understanding of how we fit in it.

In his White House memoir, The World As It Is, President Obama’s longtime aide Ben Rhodes recounts a conversation he had with the then-president about the power of storytelling. In May of 2016, as the president’s motorcade traveled through Hanoi, Vietnam, Obama urged Rhodes not to shy away from using stories to make the case for the administration’s policies and decisions. “The notion that there’s something wrong with storytelling — I mean, that’s our job,” Obama told him. “To tell a really good story about who we are.”

Obama’s comment gets at the essence of human evolution. In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, the historian and author Yuval Noah Harari argues that what sets human beings apart from other species, and what has enabled us to build the societies and civilizations we know today, is our ability to cooperate with each other. Key to that cooperation is storytelling. In Harari’s telling, money is a story. Religion is a story. Nations are stories. Race is a story. These are all socially-constructed concepts that, at their worst, manufacture divisions, hierarchies, and combustible notions of “us” and “them.” At their best, though, shared values and ideas give our communities structure and enable us to build complex societies greater than the sum of their parts. Stories teach us about each other — and ourselves.

Today, we have countless ways to share information and exchange ideas. But for most of human history, there was just one: storytelling. In Sapiens, Harari describes the Sumerians, an ancient Mesopotamian people who, sometime around 3,500 B.C., developed a new way to communicate with each other. In doing so, Harari writes, the Sumerians “released their social order from the limitations of the human brain, opening the way for the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires.” What was this secret for unlocking mass cooperation? “The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians,” Harari explains, “is called ‘writing,’” and more than five millennia later, we’re still using it. “With the appearance of writing,” Harari communicates to readers using the Sumerians’ invention, we start “to hear history through the ears of its protagonists.”

The historian Joseph J. Ellis puts it well in the preface to his recent book, American Dialogue: The Founders and Us. “Reading history,” Ellis writes, “is like expanding your memory further back in time. … The more history you learn, the larger the memory bank you can draw on when life takes a turn for which you are otherwise unprepared.” Through stories we learn, we grow, we collaborate, we empathize, and we better understand ourselves and where we might fit in the world.

Like a runaway conspiracy theory on Breitbart, that brings us back to Barack Obama and Ben Rhodes. What the president suggested to Rhodes about storytelling in politics is just as true for us as individuals. Each time we read or hear about someone else’s experience, we can hold up a mirror to our own lives. We can listen for echoes of our own experiences and look for reflections of our own struggles. Seeing our story in someone else’s can be a profoundly powerful means of learning, understanding, and processing. Subconsciously or not, we can ask ourselves, What about this person’s story applies to my life? Can I learn something from her? What would I have done in his situation? What do I want to do in my own situation?

III. On sharing

That’s why we seek out others’ stories. It’s also, as I’ve come to appreciate, a good reason to share our own. Dozens of drafts of different sections of this article have been sitting on my computer for months. I could just leave them in the digital ether. After all, by getting these words out of my head and onto the digital page, writing has already served its core purpose for me. Why publish them here?

I often think about this question in the context of my side hustle of writing about U.S. politics. I previously spent years working on Capitol Hill, but today most of my involvement in politics consists of arm’s-length commentary on this platform. The evolution from a full-time job in the trenches to an on-the-side-and-as-time-allows passion project has left me wondering: What’s the value of writing to causes I believe in? Writing about politics on the internet doesn’t knock on any doors or pass any bills or raise any money for candidates whose votes could actually alter public policy. It feels a little presumptuous to try to convince myself I’m helping others by writing my own thoughts down — instead of canvassing to get out the vote, making phone calls for a congressional candidate, or trying to pass legislation on the Hill.

In Tools of Titans, the writer Tim Ferriss considers what would happen if he chose a different line of work — perhaps one with fewer solitary hours in front of the keyboard. “If I stop writing,” he wonders, “perhaps I’m squandering the biggest opportunity I have, created through much luck, to have a lasting impact on the greatest number of people.” Few writers are likely to end up with as large a platform as Ferriss has, but I think most of us share a similar desire to help people through writing. Is this hope realistic, or is it a self-serving justification to give ourselves permission to spend a huge amount of time doing something we enjoy?

The act of publishing, of sharing one’s thoughts with the world, is a conscious choice not to assume that because we stumbled across an idea that the rest of the world already knows it. It’s to hope that others might find inspiration, clarity, or solidarity in our experiences and our ideas. It’s to aim to give readers a sense of community and, if we’re lucky, to help them make sense of the world by providing something they’re missing or hadn’t yet considered.

But it’s also to accept that we might not achieve any of these goals, and to press ahead anyway. To publish one’s own writing is to welcome the possibility that this writing has already served its sole purpose — to help the author process the world — and to recognize that purpose as worthy enough in itself.

***

In 1884, nearing the end of his life and in dire need of income, the writer with whom we began — Ulysses S. Grant — was convinced to write a series of articles that would eventually become his memoir. As Ron Chernow describes it, Grant originally found the process uninspiring. But, guided by a talented editor, he began to find joy and, presumably, some peace of mind in the task before him. “Why, I am positively enjoying the work,” he remarked to his editor. “I am keeping at it every night and day, and Sundays.” Over time, Chernow writes, Grant “experienced the pride of authorship, pleasure of craftsmanship, and delight of reliving past triumphs.”

Like Grant, and like countless other writers, it took a long time for me to see writing not as an obligation but instead as an opportunity. An opportunity to make sense of the world. An opportunity to process my thoughts and experiences. An opportunity to figure out what I think. An opportunity to create. An opportunity to hone a craft. An opportunity to explore new ideas. An opportunity to share what I’ve learned.

Even if it doesn’t change any minds or pass any bills, the craft of writing helps me take the raw materials of life and transform them into something marginally coherent. Even if the only outcome of what I write, read, and share is a little more clarity about my own experience, that goal is undoubtedly worthwhile — and the process itself is enormously fulfilling.

Now, having thus made some sense of my thoughts, I’ll click “Publish.”

This column was originally published in the Medium publication ‘The Writing Cooperative.’