Writing Is Socializing

I have been reading Sarah Rose Cavanagh’s terrific new book, Hivemind: The New Science of Tribalism in Our Divided World, and it’s making me see writing in ways I’ve never considered before.

Hivemind is an exploration of the many different ways we are connected and the positive and negative connotations of those connections. If there is a mantra to the book it’s “nothing is simple,” and Cavanagh examines and then complicates numerous ideas and concepts involving our connectedness. For one small example, she takes on the powerful cultural narrative of the “problem” of teen “smartphone addiction” presented in Jean Twenge’s iGen: Why Today’s Super Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood – and What That Means for the Rest of Us, and subsequently taken up by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.

Cavanagh reminds us that this research is in its early days and looking at large data sets for correlations – as Twenge does – can reveal potentially spurious findings. Additionally, “smartphone addiction” itself is too broad a category to cover the myriad things we do on our phones. In short, we know this is a phenomenon worth looking at, but it’s premature to draw strong conclusions.

Twenge’s book (and the original article in The Atlantic it was spawned from) was widely read as far as these things go, but the cultural narrative of “smartphone addiction” expands many times beyond the number of people who would have read those sources. This is an illustration about how truly connected we are, part of human “hive.”

I’ve often thought of writing as an essentially selfish, anti-social activity. After all, with few exceptions, writing is a solo activity. Even when I am writing in the physical presence of another – at this moment my wife is in the same room reading – my primary focus is on my own thoughts. 

But Hivemind has me seeing that much of my writing is, in reality, a form of socializing. Cavanagh quotes psychologist Michael Tomasello, “Thinking is like a jazz musician improvising a novel riff in the privacy of his own room. It is a solitary activity al right, but on an instrument made by others for that general purpose, after years of playing with and learning from other practitioners, in a musical genre with a rich history of legendary riffs, and for an imagined audience of jazz aficionados. Human thinking is individual improvisation enmeshed in a sociocultural matrix.”

In other words, we’re never truly alone with our thoughts. Whatever writing I’m doing is only made possible because of all of the other writing I’ve read, the conversations I’ve had, the life I’ve lived among other human beings.

Writing for a blog space is perhaps obviously social. After years of doing this, I often explicitly think of the audience as I write or consider writing. To be perfectly candid, I occasionally steer myself away from topics where I believe audience response may fall into predictable patterns, even if I’m trying to attack a subject from a new angle and break loose a logjam. 

This is either a failure of nerve or of skill, but that I am acting in ways that indicate how I am connected to others that for the most part I’ve never been physically proximate to illustrates the inherently social nature of writing this blog.

But the social aspect of writing isn’t confined to blogs or tweets or other social media platforms. 

I’ve often wondered why I’m not more dedicated to doing whatever it takes to get my fiction published and into the world of readers. Some of it may be a lack of ambition, that while it’s nice to be read, I have no desire to be known, if that distinction makes sense. 

Fear may also play a role, that in the end the writing simply isn’t good enough. I know it isn’t as good as I wish it to be because my reach exceeds my grasp, but maybe it is just plain not good and some part of my subconscious knows it.

Thing is, I find the act of writing fiction very satisfying, very enjoyable in and of itself. I don’t think I would blog without knowing I had this outlet – I certainly didn’t blog before having this outlet – but through my entire adult life I’ve been drawn to writing fiction, including sketching out stories longhand on legal pads at my desk at my post undergrad paralegal job when I was supposed to be working.

I took that as a sign that I should go to graduate school, and I’ve been writing fiction ever since, getting some of it published – including two books, thank you very much – but with a ratio of words written to words published of, I don’t know, thousands to one. (I can’t even do the math.)

I have four, full-length unpublished novels, two of which are quite probably publishable. (Not earth shatteringly good, but you know, not bad.) I probably have 100 completed short stories[1]never published that are a similar quality to stories I have had published.

Oh, I’ve sent the manuscripts to a couple of places and been rejected, which is par for the course. If you want a book of fiction published, if you want to be read, you need to persevere through those challenges. Why would I spend so many hours writing these narratives if not to share them with others, what good are they confined to my computer’s hard drive?

Hivemind has me understanding that all this tap tapping away on my computer keyboard writing these stories may just be one of the ways I enjoy socializing. 

I am like Tomasello’s jazz musician, perfectly content to practice this art form that has provided me so much pleasure as a reader. My writing is often likely that, a way to honor those I’ve read by recombining those experiences into narratives of my own. 

Don’t get me wrong, I still wish I’d get off my ass and work harder at putting these manuscripts in the world, but thanks to Hivemind, I better understand the roots of my pleasure in this work, and it has me thinking harder about how to inculcate that same pleasure in students. 

Hivemind is a book I’ll be gnawing over for quite some time.