Essayist Arthur Krystal on why writers are often smarter on the page than in conversation:
[W]riters don’t have to be brilliant conversationalists; it’s not their job to be smart except, of course, when they write. Hazlitt, that most self-conscious of writers, remarked that he did not see why an author “is bound to talk, any more than he is bound to dance, or ride, or fence better than other people. Reading, study, silence, thought are a bad introduction to loquacity.”
Sounds right to me. Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person. In fact, I am smarter when I’m writing. I don’t claim this merely because there is usually no one around to observe the false starts and groan-inducing sentences that make a mockery of my presumed intelligence, but because when the work is going well, I’m expressing opinions that I’ve never uttered in conversation and that otherwise might never occur to me. Nor am I the first to have this thought, which, naturally, occurred to me while composing. According to Edgar Allan Poe, writing in Graham’s Magazine, “Some Frenchman—possibly Montaigne—says: ‘People talk about thinking, but for my part I never think except when I sit down to write.” I can’t find these words in my copy of Montaigne, but I agree with the thought, whoever might have formed it. And it’s not because writing helps me to organize my ideas or reveals how I feel about something, but because it actually creates thought or, at least supplies a Petri dish for its genesis.
September 29th, 2009 | 4:05 pm
Oh, man that is SO me. My sons routinely ask me to just write what I have to say to them, since I’m more fluent on paper than in person.
September 29th, 2009 | 6:03 pm
Me, too. I can’t wait for us all to get together and speak in incoherent monosyllables.
September 29th, 2009 | 8:49 pm
I always tell students, if you want to see someone’s composition, you have to see their composition.
September 29th, 2009 | 11:34 pm
When I’ve taught writing, I’ve always tried to teach it as a thought process. That’s why writing drafts matters — it’s not just busy work that the mean teacher assigns merely because she likes to watch people suffer.
The writing strategy my composition students always hated, which always produced the best results, was to take their latest, labored-over draft, put it in a drawer, and start over with a blank sheet of paper or a blank screen. O, the wailing. O, the looks of steely hatred when I told them that this was what they must do. They thought they’d reached the point where all they had to do was go in and fix a few commas (which would mean, probably, ruining punctuation they’d actually gotten right the first time) and be done. And I wanted them to start all over?
I got pretty good at looking imperturbable, and saying chirpily, “Well, now you know what you want to say, right?”
I’m rarely sure I’m right, but that was something I was right about. I’m not a great classroom teacher, mostly because I’d rather be writing than talking to other people, in person, aloud, about writing, but that move always worked, and they would have to admit to me that although they had hated it, and me, it was true that the process of writing this succession of drafts had been a thought process, not a tap-dance rehearsal, and that what they’d ended up writing had been way better than the draft I’d made them put in the drawer.
September 30th, 2009 | 10:22 am
Posting a comment on a “blog” seems more like conversation than writing. Misspellings, gaps in logic, assertions unsupported by argument – all of these seem to pass unnoticed until after the posting. … and yet one “posts” on.
October 1st, 2009 | 7:51 am
Hooray for the gift of introversion!
It is we introverts who find ourselves so much more intelligent on paper than in person. The need to reflect and ponder in seclusion gives this result. The world would be bereft of so much literary wisdom were it not for introversion.
Extroverts, on the other hand, think by spreading their gifts over the landscape like manure, thinking out loud and developing their thoughts in a communal way.
Hooray for the gift of extroverts too!
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