Writing for Strangers
I check out The Writer’s Almanac every day and noticed this morning that today is the birthday of novelist and travel writer Pico Iyer who said:
“Writing should … be as spontaneous and urgent as a letter to a lover, or a message to a friend who has just lost a parent … and writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.”
That really speaks to me, as a) I never know what these blog posts are about until a few seconds before they’re composed, and b) many of them contain heartfelt messages delivered to people, most of whom I’ll never know.
I’m reminded of an incident that brought a big smile to my face 14 years ago, when I was watching my then four-year-old son playing on a jungle gym. He had encountered a little girl he didn’t know, and tried to strike up a conversation. She said something to him I couldn’t make out, but I figured it out from my son’s reply: “Oh, it’s OK. You can talk to me. I’m not a stranger. I’m Jake Shields.”
I write that way, thank God for spell check. When I speak I do the same, but I can talk much better than I can write. I am so passionate when I write often people make fun of me. If I am not that passionate about something, I wont waste my time. Nor yours.
Greg Chick
On certain subjects, writing should be based on hard data and facts. That means that it cannot be totally spontaneous.
Lord Kelvin stated that knowledge that cannot be expressed in numbers is not knowledge; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but it is of a meagre and unsatisfactory sort. His statement may be a slight exaggeration, but only a slight exaggeration. There are subjects on which numbers are important, and the numbers must add up. Energy policy is one of those subjects.
Lord Kelvin was a noted scientist with many accomplishments. It was his diligent work that made the first underseas transcontinental telegraph cable possible and successful; the previous attempt to lay the cable had failed because of failure to do the necessary scientific research work first. The Kelvin temperatures scale was named after him. His success was to a high degree based on his insistence on developing measurement instruments, doing careful research work, and doing careful calculations. He would be appalled by energy policies that are based on feeling good, hope, and good intentions, rather than on careful quantitative research work.