Define Writing

Take it in the literal sense and you’ve lost. If all you see and know are a sequence of letters, words, or symbols marked on a surface, then you’ve already failed. For sure you’re not wrong, that’s what writing is. Squiggles on paper. Meaningless scrawled lines that don’t matter.

Until you read them. You see, writing pertains to more than just a definition. More than just an art. Writing is thought.

It took us from hunting and gathering to the might of the Roman Empire. Its importance was acknowledged following the fall. Preserved for millennia. Selfishly guarded by some. But I am not here to tell you my take on history. I am here to tell you what writing is.

Writing is thought personified. Thought given new meaning, new purpose. It has more meaning than something one does to make themselves immortalised. That definition is misconstrued. Bulwer-Lytton and many before him claimed it had greater power, even than the blade; than the armed forces. After all it is words that send men to their deaths or onto greatness. But that is what writing is capable of. What it can do. Not what it is.

Writing is more than an image created be a string of symbols and context. Writing is an idea. More than the spreading, the formulation, the creation of ideas. It can be used to build edifices, form worlds, shape people, both material and illusory. It can be used to destroy, to record that which may be lost or autography journeys both real and imaginary.

Until a book is picked up, that’s all it is. A book. Words on paper. It doesn’t matter to you or affect your life.

But once written, once read, whether it’s a word or a partially remembered phrase, the idea is born. The thought is made. The impression it leaves behind, the idea it imprints, the way it can change and alter one’s way of thinking is all too real.

Writing is more than just words. More than characters. It comes in many forms and takes a thousand-thousand shapes.

Ideas are what we live for. And writing is personified ideas. That is not to say writing is life. Far from it.

We are words. We are ideas. We are our own thoughts.

Writing is but the method in which we have learned to convey them on something more concrete than air.