Benefits of Writing

I started writing in my spare time five years ago. I don’t really remember why, or what prompted me. The habit began somewhere and stuck in some way.

There is a published book, quite a few booklets and essays, magazine articles, a few dozen beBee posts, personal musings, and other pieces not  public. This is spare time activity, at work there is more. I write about one thousand words per week - sometimes more, sometimes less. Many on beBee produce far more prolifically.  

Over time I am finding there are many benefits to writing regularly. Yes, there are pecuniary rewards, and the welcome glow of acknowledgement. For me there are also other, intrinsically good things that come from writing regularly.

    Writing enhances my memory. It aids recall of events, semblances and thoughts and in so doing strengthens the gestalt of who I am and what I recollect. Honing words around a certain experience, recalls that experience. Particularly so in travel writing. A sense of place and time once been to, now recreated and relived. People and faces more firmly imprinted in my mind and recollection. Good memories and fond memories.

    It clarifies my mind. Ideas and concepts churns in my mind until I write it down. I find a certain sequence and coherence in what before was jumbled and see my thoughts reflected back to me in a more orderly fashion. Distilling thought on paper, clarifies the thought. Some articles I have written, reread once, and posted. Others are on the fifth draft and it still does not feel right. Many I have discarded. In all I believe my thoughts are clearer than before.

    I think better. (I think!) Thinking while you speak, thinking unto thought itself, and thinking onto paper, are to me different modes of cognition and awareness. Writing channels the mind in a certain way and the act of writing is generative in that capturing thought fosters new thought in itself. It is both inductive and deductive. Some scribbles need to be sharpened to a more precise formulation, others lead to ideas anew.

    Writing is recreational. To me at least. When at my desk, the busyness of world dissolves in the focus to transcribe meaning onto paper. Focusing only on one thing for a time, in this case whatever I am writing on, ebbs the overdrive of information and impression taking of a busy world. At my desk time stands still, or passes very quickly - it differs. For some strange reason, writing simply makes me happier.

    It is an artistic outlet. Even the most factual writing still needs to be shaped into meaning, and polished into clear understanding. Writing is a unique personal expression and a shaping of something which wasn’t there before. It is a giving of who you are and a creation of something of you. There is a quest for improvement and perfection (never attained) and the immersion of creation. It is art, that which is only from you and of you. 

    It heightens my awareness. Writing is focused awareness, and it heightens appreciation and perspective of the topic, event, theme or persons communicated onto paper. I also find a strange after effect when publishing something. It keeps on churning in my mind leading to a keener and more calibrated understanding (often too late!). To write is to view and think of the world and events through the lens of potential transcription.

    I am creating a legacy. This may sound egotistical but whatever I write, I keep. And sometimes I reread it months, years later.  Some is on hard copy, some on soft copy, some on social media, some on actual paper. And I write more. And in doing so I find I am slowly building a trace of have been here, having experienced things, and having thought about them. And word by word there is something of me that might just be there for some time.