How I Write

If you want to learn what you think about something, write about it. Here's how I do it.

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Just under two hundred years ago, Victor Hugo faced a serious problem.

Every time he sat down to write, something or other would distract him, prompting him to fly out of the house to attend to an urgent matter, or meet a friend, or explore the world.¹ Each an understandable pursuit, but with an unfortunate consequence: his writing would languish, untouched, always lingering as a work in progress.

Flirting with progress never led to completion, so Hugo realized he needed a drastic intervention. He called in a servant and gave him rather unusual orders: to meticulously gather up all of Hugo’s clothes and hide them. Without proper attire—or indeed any—Hugo would be forced to write.

When the cold drifted in, Hugo wrapped his naked figure in what his wife later described as “a huge grey knitted shawl,” presumably shivering away, bent appropriately over his craft, as he poured himself into The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Hugo finished the book.

“He was very sad,” remembered his wife.

Such sadness was also familiar to Franz Kafka, who struggled with existential dread as he sought to write in the early 20th century:

APRIL 8, 1914: “Yesterday incapable of writing even one word. Today no better. Who will save me?”

JANUARY 20, 1915: “The end of writing. When will it take me up again?”

JANUARY 29, 1915: “Again tried to write, virtually useless.”

JANUARY 30, 1915: “The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.”

Jack Kerouac, for his part, found his writing flow terribly disrupted by the incessant business of replacing pages in his typewriter, so he came up with a novel solution: why not just write on one absurdly long scroll? He did, and On the Road was originally drafted on a single roll of paper that was 120 feet long.

Others, like John Steinbeck—who also struggled with the writing process—nonetheless will go on to complete a masterpiece, only to grapple with what every self-doubting author naturally concludes after they read a scathing review from some rando on Goodreads who skimmed their book and hated it.

JUNE 18, 1938: “…I am assailed with my own ignorance and inability…For no one else knows my lack of ability the way I do. I am pushing against it all the time. Sometimes, I seem to do a good little piece of work, but when it is done it slides into mediocrity…

I dare not compare myself to these greats for the simple reason that it would be embarrassing, but several readers have asked me if there is a method to my madness when I’m writing about Assyriologists or Tongan court jesters or our conspicuous lack of tails. I figured I would answer, not because everyone reading will soon be starting their own essay compilation, but because everyone can benefit from writing.

If you want to know what you think about a topic, write about it. Writing has a way of ruthlessly exposing unclear thoughts and imprecision. This is part of what is lost by ChatGPT, the mistaken belief that the spat out string of words in a reasonable order is the only goal, when it’s often the cognitive act of producing the string of words that matters most.

So come and join me, dear reader, as I bring you under my huge grey knitted shawl, and reveal the secrets of how I write.²