why you should write more

and share it online

Hello! Please take a few minutes and fill out the Bookbear Express Demographic Survey. I really want to learn more about you guys!

1. It helps people find you. I like every single person I’ve met through my Substack (over the past four years (the workshops have helped a lot!) I would estimate I’ve met 100+ people who first found me through Bookbear Express and I genuinely liked all of them) and I’ve met some of my closest friends through being online.

   1. My general thesis is something like, “If someone has a really good theory for why we would get along,” they’re probably right. There are a lot of people I think are cool, but I’m not necessarily desperate to meet them because I don’t think they would necessarily benefit from knowing me. I feel this way about many authors/actors/etc: I love their work, but probably if I met them in person I’d be tongue-tied and awkward so I’m just delighting in their existence. But once in a blue moon I come across someone and I’m like, wait, I genuinely think we would be best friends.

   2. Because we live in a world where everyone participates in parasocial relationships I actually think most people are very well-adjusted—

      they’ll reach out if they’re interested in meeting you, and they understand if you’re too busy. Anyone who’s not well-adjusted tends to stand out and it goes without saying that you should not engage with them.

2. It helps you find other people. For me, the biggest promise of the Internet has always been that it used to be very hard to search for people. Back in the day, you would kind of just marry whoever lived in your town and seemed sort of compatible, like they also really liked to read. Now if your favorite book is Jung on Mythology it is trivial to find a whole subreddit’s worth of people who share the exact same interest.

   1. However, I think the biggest problem is that most people are not very good at searching. Writing helps you get better, because it forces you to be more specific.

      1. Many of the ways we use the interact do not help us get better at searching. Instead, the algorithm spoon-feeds content to you. This is true even of dating apps: instead of needing to be proactive, you scroll through a lineup of palatable options like you’re at a conveyor belt sushi restaurant. Most people don’t know how to be proactive or specific anymore; they’ve either lost the skill or never learned it.

      2. A large percentage of people’s problems in work, love and life are due to some combination of vagueness and passivity. You don’t know what you want to spend your time on; you don’t know what kind of person you really get along with; you don’t know what kind of clothing looks good to you; you don’t know what you value in a city; you don’t know how to spend a Saturday night. And even if you do know, you might not know how to find it. If you can articulate more to yourself, you can get more specific, and start looking for it.

   2. You might be thinking, Ava, how does writing help me find people? Let me explain:

      1. Writing helps clarify to you what you’re actually interested in.

      2. It also helps you critically consume content, like Nikhil points out. Being active on the Internet instead of passive on the Internet changes everything. You really understand what you like.

         

      3. It’s easy to identify the people who write or make the things that rhyme with what you’re making. You then inherently have more in common with them because you’re making something, too.

      4. If you want to contact these people, you can just be like, “Here’s my own writing for context!” For instance, if you write a Substack, you can reach out to pretty much anyone else who writes a Substack just based on the premise of “we both have this weird but great job.”

3. Everyone can benefit from a writing practice.

   1. I really object to the tweets I see that say, Writing is not good for anxiety. It just makes you overanalyze. Personally, writing is not how I analyze how I feel; writing is how I resolve how I feel. I find it deeply cathartic.

   2. Of course, writing is great for thinking. If you do want to analyze anything from a relationship to a work problem, writing 1000 words about it can really clear your mind.

   3. Writing is a very mythologized Vocation and even multiple years into making a living off of my writing I still struggle to call myself a Writer. I think the rarefied nature of the label often discourages people from writing at all. But writing is an fundamental form of communication, a way to document, reason and process. Everyone who’s reading this has some kind of writing practice and most of us could benefit from putting more time into it. Starting this Substack has obviously changed my life and career, but the act of writing everyday for years has also changed me. I’ve become a much stronger communicator and I understand myself more deeply. I know how to process my emotions in a considered way, how to translate them onto the page. “The Artist’s Way” is a phenomenon so I know I’m not alone in saying this, but I really think more people should be doing morning pages.