Passionate writing is excellent writing
One thing I’ve come to learn over the years that I’ve been writing is that the more passionate you are about a subject, the easier it is to write about it. Ditto for being more knowledgeable about a subject (but that is perhaps trivial). My favorite posts are those about the subjects I am most passionate about. And not only is the resultant work better, but it takes less time to write as well. I’ve spent hours laboring over works that didn’t turn out very satisfyingly, whereas for other works I sat down, wrote at a break-neck speed, and within ten minutes had something I was really proud of.
For instance, look at the post I wrote the recent death of my great-aunt Muriel. It was an obituary of sorts, covering salient points of her life, explaining why the unknowledgeable reader should care that she died. It also expressed my innermost feelings on expected deaths. I think it came out really well, and I can tell it resonated with others by the comments that were left. Yet it was incredibly easy to write, probably taking a total of less than half an hour (and it was written within a few hours of hearing of her death). I didn’t even have the time to go research how old she was, leaving a perhaps too gruff proclamation to set the tone at the beginning of the post, but I shan’t go back and edit it. That post is from-the-heart, brutally honest, and essentially unedited, yet since it was something I felt passionate about, it just flowed from my mind, through my fingers and the keyboard, and onto the screen. I swear the number of typos I was making was lower than average, even though the typing speed was higher.
My first column for University of Maryland’s student newspaper The Diamondback was on a topic I am very passionate about, evolution. I’m very happy with the way that one turned out. It did take awhile to write, but only because I was completely unfamiliar with writing for the newspaper business. My later columns on similar subject matters were dashed off very quickly, yet with good results, because I am passionate about and intimately familiar with the material.
Now compare that to my column on bike theft on campus, which, frankly, was a waste of newspaper space. Being a columnist for the Diamondback was kind of limiting. We had to write about topics relevant to students and the school, and even though my column was only published twice a month, I couldn’t always find anything interesting to me to write about. Hence the column about bike theft. I’ll be honest: I don’t give a damn about bike theft. I don’t own a bike, it’s a boring topic, and nobody really cares. Yet it took me longer to write that column (over three hours, I think) than any other one I ever wrote. Why? Because I was reaching so hard just to find something to say about it. The thrust of the column boils down to one sentence: “Bike theft is bad and security measures on campus should be better,” gaining nothing in the expansion to a whopping full page of newspaper column. Yet I couldn’t come close to distilling my blog post about my great-aunt down into a smaller number of words without vastly affecting its quality.
As I peruse my blog’s archives, the posts that consistently jump out as being the best are those for which for the ratio of number of words written to time spent writing is highest. It may seem bizarre that I spent relatively little time on my best posts, but I know when I’m in the writing zone and when I’m not. The difference is night and day. When I’m not excited about the subject, it can take minutes between sentences as I desperately clutch at something else to say about it. I can rewrite individual sentences many times, looking for one that sounds least bad rather than one that sounds best. When I am passionate about a subject, I write things like “A brief stopover at Roby Cemetery“, my tale on the taste of rocket fuel, and my tale of observing a meteor from terribly light polluted urban environs. These strike me as some of my better works, and if you haven’t seen them already, you might want to take a look, if only to better know what writing passionately is all about. It may help to visualize me typing them out furiously all at once, stopping only at the end to go back through and correct spelling errors and finding no other flaws.
The moral of this story is, only write about subjects you care deeply about. Unless you’re a newspaper columnist on a regular schedule, you have no excuse for writing shoddy posts on topics you couldn’t care less about. Don’t do it even if those topics are popular, in the hope that you might get attention for hopping on whatever is the latest news wave. Readers aren’t stupid. They can easily tell the difference between shoddy work and impassioned work. The won’t bother reading your dispassionate work on popular subjects; rather, they’ll flock to the people who are do truly care about them. Strive to be exceptional, not mediocre. In that way lies success.
And in case you were wondering, this post didn’t take long to write at all.
April 14th, 2008 at 21:05
One more example of passionate writing that didn’t quite make it into the blog post: Daniel Holz’s obituary of John Wheeler. Having essentially written an obituary of my own just recently, I can empathize with exactly what he was going through. I bet it didn’t take him long at all to write that, yet it is an incredibly powerful piece of writing, likely his best in the past month, or even all year. When you’re passionate about a subject, you don’t need to waste time thinking of things to say about it or ways in which to phrase those things. Everything just comes into your mind at once in a made rush. The true battle is committing it all to the screen before any of it is forgotten.
April 14th, 2008 at 22:44
I was running into this phenomenon myself while working on my Yay-I’m-in-Japan blog. I wrote a couple posts because I couldn’t think of anything else to do at the time, and I was kind of forcing it. None of them came out very well, despite that I spent about four hours writing about three pages of text. And yet I’ve spent under half an hour writing that same amount and had them come out fairly coherent.
The other problem I run into blogging is that, as I read through what I’ve written, I’ll often want to include some other detail that I didn’t mention, but doing so would completely ruin the flow of the writing. I think you said something similar in your post a few days ago on parenthetical insertions.
April 14th, 2008 at 23:08
Preserving the flow of writing is very hard for me. I frequently encounter situations where I have three, maybe even four orthogonal ideas that I need to cram into a single sentence or else some will have to be left out. It’s a tricky situation to resolve, and sometimes I just resort to parentheses when I cannot decide which ideas to excise, even resorting to the use of semi-colons in the parenthetical phrase to insert multiple independent ideas.
And where is your Japan blog? I’d love to read about that. Pimp your blog!
April 15th, 2008 at 04:12
My Japan blog is hosted on a rented server, but published through Google’s Blogger service due to my host being not providing effective database access.
July 7th, 2008 at 18:31
[...] is a must-read for any blogger or writer, would-be or otherwise. The most important advice to me? Write about subjects you care about and write about things that readers will find interesting. I’m proud to say I came up with [...]