Is Writing Dead?

I spent the day yesterday in Muskegon at a Do More Good event for nonprofits, put on by my friend Bill McKendry and the talented Do More Good team. A nice mix of speakers, lots of Q&A and brainstorming, panel discussions, networking and more. I enjoyed it. But one of the speakers said something that got me thinking the last 24 hours or so (actually a number of speakers said things that got me thinking, but this one comment in particular got my attention).

I'm paraphrasing, but basically the speaker's assertion was that more and more we live in a visual culture where the role of writing in communications, marketing and public relations is becoming less and less important.

On the face of it this assertion seems logical. The popularity of social media tools like Instagram and Pinterest would seem to bear testimony to this belief that the popularity of images is rising, while that of words is sinking. 

On the other hand, we've always attested that "a picture is worth a thousand words." A little research shows me this phrase goes back more than 100 years in popular usage in this country and even further than that under other iterations. Indeed, some 500 years ago Leonardo da Vinci is reputed to have said that what a painter can depict in an instant would see a poet "overcome by sleep and hunger" before they could adequately describe the scene with words.

So images seem to have had a bit of the upper hand for half a millennium now. And yet, still, over the last 500 years words have endured. So I wonder, as the famous wordsmith Mark Twain once observed about his own premature obituary, if the rumors about the death of words have perhaps been exaggerated?

Now I'm a writer first and foremost (though I run social media feeds for clients on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter), so perhaps I have a vested interest in the resilience of words. And perhaps my experiences online are atypical and not broadly transferable to the experiences of others. If so, feel free to ignore or disagree with what I have to say.

But, it strikes me that there is still a fundamental place for writing in both virtual and physical environments in the year 2019 (and beyond).

Yesterday someone flagged an article on LinkedIn (or maybe Facebook) called Stay in the Game. Have you seen this one yet?

Feel free to browse over to it and then come back here (though after you read it you might find my observations pretty pedestrian by comparison!).

What did you think? Pretty amazing story, right? No pictures, no video, no infographic. Just 1,800 words or so. 1,800! I don't know about you, but I hung on every one of them. And that ending. Jeez, what a kicker. 

Or take this story a friend of mine sent my way the other day via email. It's called "What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane," and man is it a good read (feel free to check it out *after* you finish this piece!). Now my friend is a long-form journalism aficionado like I am, so that might be part of why he liked the piece and why he thought I would too. He was right. I devoured the article, every bit of its 10,000 words! And apparently I wasn't the only one as it's the second-most popular piece on The Atlantic's website right now, trailing only a piece by Arthur C. Brooks called "Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think." That article I also read, and a group of my hockey friends has been passing it around to each other as well. It's roughly 8,000 words.

For me these are not isolated experiences. Numerous times each week I read something that sticks with me, that moves me in some way to unexpected emotion, that causes introspection and reflection, that I find myself pondering oftentimes days and weeks later. And, anecdotal evidence only, I suspect that I am not alone in these lasting reactions to the power of stories.

Perhaps that's why Amazon's Jeff Bezos has his senior meetings begin with the digestion of long, written, printed memos. Bezos believes that just the act of writing these memos forces clear thinking, before the meeting even begins. At Amazon they call these memos "narratives." There are also Bezos' long annual letters to shareholders. The 2019 version checked in at almost 2,500 words. 

In a recent piece on slab.com, Ben Bashaw said this: "Bezos is Amazon's chief writing evangelist, and his advocacy for the art of long-form writing as a motivational tool and idea-generation technique has been ordering how people think and work at Amazon for the last two decades—most importantly, in how the company creates new ideas, how it shares them, and how it gets support for them from the wider world."

I also have to point out the success of one of my favorite websites, The Athletic, to which I )and apparently many others) pay several dollars per month to read great sports stories. Their coverage of the NHL is second-to-none, and they have some of the best sports writers going (the primary focus of The Athletic is the written word). My hockey friends and I pass around long stories from The Athletic several times per week.

So what's going on here? There is a ton of research out there on stories and story telling and the power of stories to inform, persuade, create empathy and meaning and more. I won't bore you with all of that research. I will say that both the "Stay in the Game" and "What Really Happened to Malaysia’s Missing Airplane" stories follow some pretty conventional advice for storytelling in terms of their main elements (protagonist, antagonist, inciting action, conflict and resolution).

I also will commend to you this New York Times piece from 2012, called "Your Brain on Fiction." It's a fascinating read. 

For example, there is this: "What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like 'lavender, 'cinnamon' and 'soap,' for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells."

Can you imagine? Well, of course you can; you're a human being. Still, is that wild or what. Language and smell both triggered at once by one compelling word. 

Or there's this paragraph from the piece: " ... a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like 'The singer had a velvet voice' and 'He had leathery hands' roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like 'The singer had a pleasing voice' and 'He had strong hands,' did not."

Whoa. As a writer I have to tell you that that last paragraph got my attention. 

I used to use a quote when I taught writing seminars that went like this: "Writing is easy. I just open a vein and bleed."

It's actually an abridged version of something written in "Confessions of a Story Writer" by Paul Gallico.

He said this: "It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don’t feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you’re wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories."

I think what Gallico asserts here is what the Emory researchers discovered: the reader knows. Subconsciously as it turns out, the reader knows. Bad writing, lazy writing, mail-it-in-writing fools nobody. But, as Gallico says, when you invest yourself as a writer, when it costs you a little, there's a payoff there. 

So, know this: I'm not against images. I love a powerful image. But when it comes to words, I'm also not ready to throw the baby out with the bath water. Sorry. Lazy writing there. How about this. I'm not against images, but I'm still a believer in words, a believer in their lavender goodness, their leathery appeal, their velvet caress of the eyes and ears.

Okay. Too much. Sorry.

But you get the point I presume.

Words still work. And if we use them well, they might even be able to do more good.