Note on Writing

A dear friend from my youth (pictured) wrote to me the other day and asked me about my thoughts on writing.  My response:

To me, it’s an opportunity to express whatever I’m thinking, with whatever degree of circumspection and perfection I care to put into it.  In speaking, I don’t have the luxury of entertaining my ideas from different perspectives that take time to emerge and digest, and then editing them until they’re exactly what I want to get across.

To my astonishment, there are people whose spoken expressions are just as polished as their writing. I’m thinking about people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens, three incredible intellectuals who happen to be spokespeople for atheism. There are also composers, e.g., Mozart, whose original scores show almost no corrections; the notes just poured out of them as though there were being channeled from God. I can’t begin to do that; I don’t even know exactly how that’s possible.  Even these two short paragraphs, by the time I hit “send,” will have gone through several rounds of editing.