This is the first of a monthly sporadic essay series called ‘Shades of Thought’. Each essay will be about something or someone I am curious about, interested in, or struggling with personally. If anything within this essay resonates with you, I’d love to hear about it, just send me an email: mrkamparing@gmail.com. Thank you!

Everybody can write

[I may need to read a few more science journals to beef up my thesis around this statement] but in most ways I have been able to think of it, I think it’s a statement that can be made on good enough authority.

The Britannica says “writing renders language visible.” All communication is built upon language, and every human being alive is capable of expressing themselves in at least one language. Fact.

In other words, we all are biologically and sociologically equipped with the knowledge and understanding of language. If writing makes language visible and, as previously established, all human beings are equipped with language, then any human being can render language visible. Ergo, everybody can write.

The ability to write also transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries. Differently-abled people are not excluded either: Stephen Hawking and Helen Keller are great examples of historically-famous, differently-abled people who showed great writing skill.

"Writing is a way of thinking" and "If you can talk, you can write" are two quotes from William Zinsser and James Patterson respectively that essentially echo this point: as a form of expression and communication, everybody can write.

What I am trying to do with all that preamble is show that writing, at its most fundamental, is not a particularly unique skill. It’s like walking, talking or taking a shit, anybody can do it and there is a high chance many people will be able to do it well. Formats, mediums and styles can be argued one way or the other but at the end of the day, rendering language visible is not a bespoke thing.

The objective of this essay is to share my thoughts about struggling to write consistently, with ideas on how to get better at it through curiosity and nailing the first draft process because, why not?

The first draft is the first (and most important) step of any longer-form writing activity

For writers like me who struggle to begin in the first place, you understand the empty hollowness you feel in your brain and body when it's time to actually start putting the words down. You know what you want to write about. You remember how excited you were when you had the idea to write about the freaks of nature that are flying fish. But here, now, you just can’t seem to start. Nowhere feels good enough as a starting point.

There’s also the psychoanalysis of whether these words you want to put down will make any sense. What if nobody thinks it's interesting? “What if I just end up making a fool of myself because none of this will make any sense to anyone?”, you might think to yourself. Imposter syndrome comes for us all, doesn’t it?

Procrastination is another hurdle. Writing creatively can feel like a toll booth where gigantic amounts of mental commitment is the price you pay to pass through. You need to be inspired and motivated and innovative. It’s just too much.

Julian Shapiro talked about writing to think in his non-fiction writing handbook. You should definitely check it out. Stephen King also talks about the basics of writing but as a way of life in the book On Writing, you should check that out too, it’s basically a textbook for writers.

These two different, but similar, ideas have really stuck with me because one reason why all those blockers I mentioned earlier exist is because we feel like we need to have all our ideas in our head before we start writing. The perfectly structured sentences, the well-thought out ideas and grammatical flow, the impeccable wielding of syntax, and so on. That definitely feels daunting.

But starting and letting it come to you as you go on is a much easier proposition. The first idea you start with leads to the next idea and that leads to the next idea and so on. It’s an interesting way to approach it.

My argument is that outside of coming up with the actual ideas for what you are going to write about, your first draft is the most important part of the putting-pen-to-paper process.

Naturally, this shakes out differently for different people (spoiler: people are different). But it is incredibly effective, I’ve found. You will be both inventive and motivated. Seriously, try it. Just open the blank document and start typing. If you get stuck, make a note of it and continue on to the next point. “Speed write your first draft,” as Shapiro puts it. Because that’s what your first draft is for: to move all of your ideas out of your brain and into real life.

You can find the most complete version of this essay on Substack.*

Your first draft is not meant to be the finished product. That’s why it’s the first draft. It’s meant to be all over the place and maybe even ramble-y. It’s meant to have errors and maybe not make sense in the way it flows. It is not a must that it has hit hooks or a killer intro. Your first draft is simply the worlds and concepts you have in your head coming to life. Beautifying it comes after that.

Of course, if you can put down a fabulous piece of writing with your first draft without any need for “motivation”, this does not apply to you so get out of here right now. (Also, how does it feel to be god’s favourite?) But for the rest of us, your relationship with your first draft can be a key determinant of how consistently you are able to write and ultimately, your maturity as a writer.

Everybody knows writing is like a muscle and you need to train it. The more you write, the better you get at it. But if you don’t write frequently because getting started is basically climbing Mount Everest, then you can’t grow or improve as a writer. Everyone has ideas, bringing them to life is where the best separate themselves from the rest of us.

Get started on your first draft and the rest becomes much easier.

The curiosity thing

Have you ever tried to define the word “curiosity”? Take a moment from reading on to try it right now then write down the most coherent definition that came to you off the top of your head. Now, look up the dictionary definition and compare. Tell me what you discover on Twitter: @AkindareLive.

The Oxford Dictionary defines curiosity as “a strong desire to know or learn something.”

Curiosity is a… curious thing. Considering how integral it is to the human experience, it is kind of impressive that we do not have a basic integrative theory of the basis, mechanisms, and purpose of curiosity. Of course, there are many ideas, studies and postulations in psychology and neuroscience that do give insight into what curiosity is and what role it plays in this existence we know of. What science does agree on is that curiosity is a “drive state for information” motivated by a perceived gap in our knowledge matrix for understanding the world.

Information is incorporeal, but it has real value to any organism with the ability to make use of it. The most common scientific theory about the purpose of curiosity is to facilitate learning. George Loewenstein, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, described curiosity as “a cognitive induced deprivation that arises from the perception of a gap in knowledge and understanding”.

Scientists have also found that curiosity enhances learning, bolstering the theory that the primary function of curiosity is to facilitate learning. Research in education has shown that allowing a learner to indulge their curiosity allows them to focus their effort on acquiring useful information that they do not yet have.

Just as the atom is the building block of a chemical element and the nucleus is the engine room of a cell, such is curiosity the life force of creativity, innovation, expression and inventiveness.

But, is it possible to not be curious? In my opinion, no. It is one of our core survival mechanisms and it is manifest to varying degrees across living organisms. The innate curiosity we are born with as humans is how babies make sense of the world in their first few years.

In adults, the diminution of curiosity is a widely acknowledged symptom of depression, and its overexpression contributes to distractibility, a symptom of disorders like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Despite its connection with the most abstract human thoughts, some rudimentary forms of curiosity can be observed in the humble roundworm.

As with most human traits, curiosity (and creativity) is a spectrum. Some people have it more than others, that’s just the way it is. But those who interrogate and develop their curiosity often turn out to be more knowledgeable and ultimately more creative and inventive.

Inventiveness is borne of curiosity. Interest in how things work and the makings of the world is what leads us to see patterns and recognise alternatives. It is why we can come up with novel ideas and posit solutions to problems. Learning thrives the most when it is fueled by boundless, healthy curiosity.

Albert Einstein once said, "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious."

All of humanity’s greatest inventions have happened because someone (or many people) were curious about something and that curiosity helped them imagine a world with a variation of the things they were curious about.

For example, Einstein's curiosity about light and space-time led to special relativity. His curiosity about gravity (200 years after Isaac Newton published Principia aka the laws of gravity btw) and its relationship to the geometry of space-time led to the development of the theory of general relativity, without which you would not have GPS, by the way.

He realised that gravity is not a force, but a curvature of space-time caused by the presence of mass and energy. This insight revolutionised our understanding of the universe and led to the prediction of phenomena like black holes and gravitational waves (measured for the first time ever in 2016, 110 years after Einstein published Die Grundlage der Allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie).

Similarly, Thomas Edison’s curiosity about how to improve the light bulb led to commercial and domestic lighting as we know it today. (No, he didn’t invent it but he and a little-known British scientist called Joseph Swan ‘perfected’ it). It famously took over 9,000 experiments for Edison, who was barely formally educated by the way, to arrive at the first true commercially viable light bulb. About 3,500 notebooks, which are preserved today in the temperature-controlled vaults of the West Orange Laboratory Archives in New Jersey, were left behind when he died in 1931.

Tim Berners-Lee’s curiosity about how scientists and researchers at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) should better share and access information among each other (and with other academic research networks), on the already existing but super-niche Internet, led to the creation of the World Wide Web aka the thing that underlines the public-facing internet as we know it today.

All the stoic wisdom we have today and the reason why people study philosophy in universities around the world is because people like Seneca the Younger, Marcus Aurelius, Socrates, and Musonius Rufus were curious about the human condition and our place in the universe. They wanted to understand why people did things and what made people, people.

“I think it might be quite common for people to feel some sort of shame about their curiosity, like it is not good enough. I was reading Johnstone's Impro recently, and it is not about curiosity, but creativity, and how he teaches that in impro theatre. And in impro theatre, the problem is often that people think their ideas are boring, unoriginal, etc, and so they block themselves. I think something similar happens with curiosity sometimes. And it might help to think about it as "divine inspiration" ie not something about you but something that happens through you and your job is just to let it out. If it is silly or boring—well, shame on god.” - unknown - via Hassan Yahaya.

The human beings who have had the most impact on humanity across time periods have been curious, arguably in extreme ways.

But the best part, at least to me, is that none of the examples I’ve given are perfect, just like no human advancement or change in human history has been without flaw.

The scientific community is still somewhat divided between Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity and the Theory of Quantum Mechanics. There are a billion different types of light bulbs today that are way more efficient and affordable than Edison’s. In the years since Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web, we’ve had Web 2.0 with social media and e-commerce and we are currently experiencing Web 3.0 with the Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence. All the stoicism and philosophy throughout human history and we still have questions about our existence till this very day.

Curiosity is such an amazing thing that curiosity about one thing can lead to brilliant creativity in another thing just by pure happenstance. Exploring your curiosity to change the world is not the point, understanding that true change on any scale is impossible without the exploration of curiosity is.

It is impossible to be good at writing without being good at being curious

We have already established that curiosity is a functional component of creativity and that writing, as a creation and expression exercise, is something that can only be improved through repetition and practice.

It tracks then, that one can draw a straight line from being good at being curious through to being good at writing consistently, should that be the form through which you choose to express your curiosity.

Simply put, if you have any aspirations toward writing consistently, then you must figure out how to be good at being curious. It is also clear that everyone is born curious, the difference between us all is the degree to which we investigate our capacity for curiosity over the course of our lives. Our worldviews and ideologies, knowledge of our external environment and ourselves, and the life-altering decisions we make are a function of what we have learned over the course of our lives and how we apply those learnings.

If, as we have clarified earlier in this essay, the main function of curiosity is to facilitate learning in all organisms with the capacity to make use of information, then your ability to be curious can be directly correlated with your ability to write consistently, learn, make sense of the world, and ultimately exist comfortably within it.

Writing, as a communicative medium, is arguably the most enduring

But why should you write? Don’t even get me started. But for the purpose of this essay, I’ll touch on four things: to think (or for others to think), to remember (or for others to remember), to learn (or for others to learn), and to capture moments in time.

Think about anything you write like a picture. Pictures are essentially moments captured in time and you can choose to keep those moments private or share them on Instagram and the family group chat. You might take a picture of a recipe in your mother's recipe book so you remember the correct ingredients to buy. Or you might take a picture of the new cup noodle brand you’ve fallen in love with on the grocery aisle so you can convert your best friend. Or maybe it’s pictures of the notes and diagrams in that lecture so you don’t forget the specific terms to ask ChatGPT about in your own research.

Writing is very much like this. You could write to think and clarify or contextualise your thoughts, privately or via Substack. Writing things down to remember is much more relatable (grocery lists are a scam, I will not be taking any questions) because most people have done that. You want to learn about yourself and why you are the way you are? Start journaling. Or maybe you just want to learn about writing or how to change the toilet sink with only a screwdriver and glue? Write a blog. I can go on.

But perhaps the most important reason why everyone should write, in my opinion, is the same reason why pictures are amazing to me [and I think everyone should take snaps every chance they get]: capturing moments in time. A lot of what we know about history and those that came before us is because people in those times wrote things. We would not have the bible, science, medicine, or any significant human achievement of the modern age for that matter, if people did not write things. We have insight into the minds, lives and experiences of people that have changed human history because they wrote stuff.

People learn about the struggles and successes of their grandparents, the evolution of their communities and find inspiration in journeys of others because someone wrote about those things. In a hundred years, what you write today could change the course of history, or just help some random kid in Singapore understand how the pandemic supercharged the advent of the gig economy.

As you explore the things you are curious about in the world, writing about those things could serve various purposes, at your discretion. It could help you think through the thing you are curious about, catalogue or expand your thoughts on it, share the new ideas you discover with the world and so on.

Curiosity + first draft mastery = writing consistently

Anyone can write. Writing as a creative and expressive process is attractive because it is arguably the most enduring non-oral communicative medium in all of human history (Gemini says art is the most enduring, so there’s also that). But to build writing skill (or train your writing muscle) you need to be curious about the world. The most efficient and utilitarian way to express that curiosity is to blitz-write your first draft every. single. time. The beautification of your curiosity comes after, through rewriting, editing etc.

So please ask questions, search for answers and contextualise your learnings through your writing. If not for anything, just to capture that moment in time is enough.

Nothing is compulsory,

Akindare.

Special thanks to Jemima Lewis, the “Curiosity & Discontent” group chat, Kay Ugwuede, Samson Toromade, Ameenah Ayodimeji, and Aisha Bello for helping to elevate this piece.