#NaNoWriMo 2021: You Can Change Your Mind
...and, if you spend any amount of time seriously writing, you almost certainly will.
I’m still thinking about a line from that profile of David Graeber I shared with you in the previous newsletter, in which Molly Fischer refers to how “Graeber described changing one’s mind as a kind of ‘political happiness’—the pleasure of realizing that you don’t have to keep thinking the things you’ve thought before.”
I believe that pleasure has implications beyond the political—and that it’s a pleasure you’ll have countless opportunities to experience if you commit yourself to a steady writing practice. You could just write to reinforce your existing attitudes and beliefs, I suppose; many people do, and some of them make a pretty good career out of it, from what I can see. In my mind, though, writing is about a full-on examination of your thoughts, your observations, the stories you tell yourself—you contemplate, you pick apart, you refine, and, in the end, you understand things a bit more fully… or you recognize more clearly the limits of your understanding.
I do believe a lot of the same things I believed ten, twenty, thirty years ago. And yet those beliefs have become far more nuanced, because I learned how to pay closer attention to the people around me, to my thoughts about those people, and to the difference between the two. Perhaps I shouldn’t be the one to say that it’s made my writing better, but I can tell you without hesitation it’s made my life richer.
Whether you’re been actively committed to National Novel Writing Month for the last two weeks or simply doing what you can to maintain your writing practice, I hope you’ve had some opportunity to experience this happiness through your writing, even if it’s about a relatively small matter.
It doesn’t even have to be directly connected to the content of your writing. It could, and often does, emerge when the thing you don’t have to keep thinking anymore is that you’re not capable of sustaining a writing practice. When you believe in yourself, when you believe that your stories matter and that you are capable of sharing them, a world of possibilities opens up.