If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.”- Benjamin Franklin
I do a lot of writing. Between this blog, my book-in-progress, assessments, plans and reports for clients, and seemingly endless email, writing is a big part of my life. If it weren’t for a writing scholarship, I wouldn’t have been able to pay for law school.
The truth is, writing comes hard for me. Most days, the ‘why am I doing this’ question pops into my mind. Sometimes it stays for hours. One of my all-time favorite writers, Annie Lamott, provides me an answer…
We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little.”- Anne Lamott
If for no other reason, I write to elevate myself about Sheep lice status.
Recently, I had a blast editing a paper on character development for one of my clients. During the process, the bitter pleasure of slicing 125+ pages into 15, I was fascinated to learn that an agreed upon definition of character does not exist.
Lay people, researchers and educators do tend to agree that a person’s character is multifaceted. It develops over time through an integrated system which includes cognition (symbolized by the Head ), affect (the Heart ), and behavior (the Hand ).
This got me thinking about the character of writing and how great writers are able to integrate Head, Heart and Hand — or as Jimmy Chen says, Mouth. Chen created this venn diagram about writers for HTMLGiant , saying:
“I think of all writing being from the head (pros: cerebral, conceptual; cons: didactic, dry), the mouth (pros: language, poetics; cons: empty banter, pure form), and the heart (pros: empathic, intimate; cons: sentimental, emotional) . My favorite writers, those in the white dashed center, are able to write from all three places.”
Where would your favorite authors fall within this diagram? (Please, tell me you have more favorite women writers than Jimmy!)
My aim is to put down what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way I can tell it.”- Ernest Hemingway
Everyone writes something, right? When you write, how often do you hit the center, the intersect between head, heart and mouth?
My task…is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see. That – and no more – and it is everything.”- Joseph Conrad
Take a moment and stop to reflect after you’ve written something this week — anything really — and ask yourself where it came from: Head, Heart, Mouth or some combination. How does it feel when you’re really in the zone, when you’re communicating — writing or speaking — with head, heart and mouth all equally? Think about a time that happened for you and then, my friend, create more of that .
#PeaceHug, Jone
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