At the beginning of this pandemic I as in the middle of a YouTube marathon and I fell upon a few interviews with the brilliant Roger Wolfson. Roger is a great TV scriptwriter who has been involved in some smash hit TV shows, and he was talking abut what writing meant to him and how it has inspired the rest of his life. This really spoke to me and so I decided that during the quarantine I would look to branch out a little with my writing and look into other areas of written work. I focused on things like poetry, scriptwriting, songwriting and story telling and it is amazing what you discover about yourself when you actually invest the time in writing things, even if they are just for you.
Opinions
When somebody asks you your opinion on things, perhaps even controversial topics, it can be hard to really get to the bottom of what you really feel. When however you are writing a story with those types of topics, it can be much easier to put yourself in many situations and to come out of it with a solution based on how you really feel. When they say that writing is an expression this is what they mean, because you write almost without thinking.
Vocabulary
When I speak, I reckon that I must use around 50% of the vocabulary that I have, perhaps even less, when I write however, it all comes out. I think this must come down to some kind of social pressure, using long words often causes people to make a face or a comment, which is of course completely absurd. When you write however you do so with absolute freedom, you can write whatever you want about whoever you want and there are no limits on restrictions on doing so.
Sharpness
Something that I have definitely noticed after writing for a few days is that mentally I am very sharp indeed. I have never liked the amount of ‘erms’ and ‘ahs’ in my natural speech yet after writing I find that these are far less frequent. This is because you are speeding up the connection between thoughts and words in your brain and that is why you feel mentally more dextrous in conversation.
Knowledge
At the risk of sounding arrogant I have also been quite impressed with the amount of knowledge which I have that I wouldn’t have thought about before. Very often I will write something down, a piece of information, and then I would go to fact check it and realize more often than not that I was right. This is something which gave me quite a sense of pride and I have no doubt that the same will happen to you. We store so much information down in the depths and it can be cathartic to get that info out and put it to good use, writing will do that for you.
