Yesterday night, after I got home from work, I found an e-mail from a longtime friend of mine [1] that came with an apologetic introduction that I probably already knew the contents of the article that he sent.  While that may be true, I thought it was a good article anyway [2] and it reveals one of the lasting and consistent motivations for my prolific writing over the course of my life, if an unconscious one.  It should come as little surprise that I met this friend when I was a student at the University of Southern California and he was the instructor of a class for writing for engineers.  Admittedly, both at that time, long before, and to this day, my writing was far beyond the scope of the class itself, which was focused on the sort of writing that engineers would be expected to do, from the preparation of presentations, the writing of lengthy reports, and even the occasional op-ed to explain technical matters to an audience of non-technical readers.  It was an immensely practical class, even if I struggled at times to create distinct authorial voices for different genres of writing, given the relentlessly consistent authorial voice I tend to have in everything I write from poems to plays to personal essays to my few attempts at prose fiction.

 Given that I started reading at the age of 3, and that I have always had a lot to say, it was probably inevitable that I would be a writer of some kind.  Being fond of books and possessed of way too much on my heart and mind, it was probably inevitable that thoughts and, to a lesser extent, feelings, would pour out of me.  This does not make it any more welcome to the outside world, or to the other people involved, but it was probably inevitable.  From the beginning of my writing, in beast fable plays about talking skunks and sardonic limericks, there was a strong ironic distance where the content created had multiple layers, with the true motivation and point of the work not on the surface level, but requiring the reader to ask questions like, “Why would someone write about a morbidly gloomy chicken afraid of becoming someone’s supper?”  Few people, it seems, ask questions like that of their writing.  Yet it remains true, no matter how often it is forgotten, that people do not write without reasons.  Not all writers are as clumsy in their agendas as some of the authors I read [3], but it requires a conscious decision for someone to sit down and spend many hours planning, writing, and editing writings, or to organize the writings of others.

 Over the course of my life, the contents of my writings have been greatly varied.  Until I graduated high school, I primarily wrote poetry, along with the occasional play and short personal essay.  Alongside that public writing, I kept a diary as soon as I had some privacy, once my brother moved in with our father.  From that point until the death of my father in my mid-20’s, I primarily wrote plays that grew increasingly philosophical and reflective in nature, aside from the essays and papers I had to write for my lengthy schooling.  Since that time I have written mostly personal essays of various size with the occasional play and poem [4], although usually these poems have been embedded within some larger personal essay or critical commentary.  I do not know if my writing will shift in its form in the future, but if it does, it will likely retain, as it has in the past, an orientation that combines observation of my surroundings, meditation and reflection upon internal matters of thinking and feeling, and a focus on history and context, all of which has remained consistent over the course of my writing so far.

 So, how is writing a lifehack?  Those who are not writers themselves may not realize what it is that writers gain through their writing given the fact that it often takes considerable time and costs a great deal in terms of privacy and admitting at times that it would be wisest or most obvious to conceal about the mess of our own lives.  For one thing, writing is therapeutic, allowing people the chance to reduce their stress and improve their mood and well-being.  It also offers practical benefits in allowing people increased skill in conveying and communicating that which is difficult to express, whether that exists in the intellectual, emotional, or spiritual realms of life.  Writing can also help cope with hard times, even if it may temporarily make them worse.  It improves learning, which is one of the main reasons I write, to better understand for myself, and hopefully to help others as well, even as it helps people deal with the hectic and complicated nature of life.  At other times, writing can be a way of developing one’s capacity for leadership by building a personal brand that demonstrates skill and competence in writing.

 In this light, it is little surprise that many of us write.  Whether we write personal blogs, articles and essays and editorials for external publication, or even turn our hand to writing larger works like books, we are engaged in the process of taking information content, organizing it, and placing it before others.  We often do this with multiple motives.  An acquaintance of mine, and not someone I would consider a particularly literary person at that, has engaged on a task to write about a technical area related to his work.  He found himself possessed of a certain degree of expertise through his years of work, found that there was a lack of material about that particular area extant, and decided to fill that void through writing.  This is often what drives people to write, regardless of the genre that they write, in that a perceived level of personal expertise alongside a niche that is not being filled satisfactorily practically amounts to a felt calling to fill that niche with one’s own writings.  Through such means people become writers and engage in accidental lifehacking, and hopefully making the world a better place in the process insofar as our words are read, understood, and properly acted upon.  To write is to hope, and many of us could use a bit more hope and optimism in our lives.

 [1] See, for example:

 [2]  http://lifehacker.com/the-psychological-benefits-of-writing-regularly-1783693547

 [3] See, for example:

 https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/03/25/book-review-25-books-every-christian-should-read/

 https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/07/20/book-review-the-9-arts-of-spiritual-conversations/

 [4] See, for example:

 https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/06/02/waiting-for-the-train/