“No words are wasted. Everything you get down on the page can be considered practice. This means you’re sharpening your skills every time you write, even if you ultimately end up shelving that work.

Today’s Writing Challenge:
Set a timer for 10-15 minutes. Now, write without pressing backspace. Keep your eyes closed if you think you can pull it off. Resist the urge to fix typos!

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The passage above popped up as a daily prompt from one of my writing groups. I often wonder why writing – as opposed to other vocations – is so riddled with angst and insecurities. Perhaps because writing is the activity most capable of getting inside our hearts and minds. Scary stuff.

Of course, we all know “the power of the pen” being “mightier than the sword.” Writing has started and sustained revolutions, after all. Writers and intellectuals are often the first to be shut down and imprisoned by dictators trying to control a population to deflect dissent. One thing is clear: what people think and believe is important.

I am inclined to ask why writing is generally viewed at the same time as commonplace and unimportant. Everyone with a basic education can read and write – up to a point. It rarely pays well. There is no well-defined formula for how to “make it in writing” like there might be, say, buying real estate and using the magic of compound interest to get rich.

My humble conclusion is that people are both intrigued and terrified about what they really feel and think about themselves and a lot of other things. To settle into a groove in life, most people adopt and accept certain assumptions and beliefs – usually ones passed on to them by their parents or culture.

Once made, people usually become quite comfortable with their choices. And once made, people are hard-pressed to alter their thinking. Too disruptive. To gain admission to and survive in a marriage, community or profession, there are unspoken rules to follow to maintain full membership.

But writers? We are often lone wolves. Our writing style and areas of expertise can be very specialized and divergent. Other writers might more often be seen as competition for scarce assignments rather than people to bond with as a group.

That is not to say that writers are not collegial. Of course they are. But discussing the basics of medicine is far less open to interpretation than who the greatest writers were and why. To say nothing about the proper time and place to use a semi-colon.

I remember once being part of a unionizing effort by magazine writers in Canada. We were nearly laughed out of the building by editors and magazine management with our demands for contracts and equal wages and reasonable kill fees if our stories didn’t run.

I was stunned to read in a recent Psychology Today article that facts don’t do much to alter people’s established beliefs anyway. Not to wander too deeply into political territory, the 45th US President freely committed crimes “in plain sight” through much of, and after, his administration. This behavior was clearly old hat and pro forma to him. He was, and remains, unchastened.

That may be the allure and terror of writing. No one wants to tell the emperor he is wearing no clothes. It will be left to future writers to dig into the facts and analyze their context to create an accurate account of all that has transpired in American politics in recent decades. Sure glad I won’t be one of them. Not my circus. Not my monkeys.

I write about healing and the human condition and my musings about making the best use of our time here on planet earth. That exploration and the people and stories it has exposed me to have always been infinitely more interesting to me.

Politicians, in order to survive at their profession, sadly seem to play the same old games and sing the same old songs. In perpetuity it would seem. The unspoken rules of their community.