Would I read and write more in 2021?
My struggle with reading and writing
For someone who spends most of my work time reading and writing, recently I have found it unsatisfactory and inadequate to continue to think and say that I struggle with reading and writing. The reality though is that I do in the common sense of what the statement means. I first conceived of this post 3 months ago and only now getting to put down my thoughts. And at this point in writing this post, the thought has crossed my mind a thousand times that I might be unable to complete this write up and published.
I sat at my desk for at least 8–12 hours a day for as long as I can remember, maybe as far back as 2009. When I had just closed up my restaurant and was looking to carve a space for myself in the digital and tech niche. For the most part of 2020, I sliced off about 2 hours from the maximum but it looks like it might go up in 2021. Through these hours, I often have a computer screen open or a pen and paper. If we lose the fancy words, what I literally do is read and write stuff. This is the beginning of my recent reflection of what do I really mean when I say that ‘I struggle with reading and writing’ even though I do it all the time.
The struggle is with reading a book cover to cover or an article from abstract to references. It gets a little worse because I tend to estimate the amount of time required to complete a reading and get discouraged by that. Now those estimates come readily as medium and a few other platforms show you even before you begin. Although I wonder who’s reading speed those are based on. There’s a parallel with my writing, between when I formulate the thoughts and decide to put them down, something happens and I end up not writing them. It is as though they become less grand.
Back-story to my reading and writing
Growing up I was an avid reader. Over a certain period of my life, maybe a little over 15 years, I might have only read religious books, motivational books and books required for me to sit through an exam. After I quit religious and motivational books, seems as though I don’t know how to really get into other types of content.
As a teenager, I had a friend who wrote his own novels. Computers where not a thing then, so he would write them in several notebooks. He challenged me to give it a try but didn’t go anywhere. I have gotten better at fiction writing now but what came easily to me was poetry. I embraced writing as a means to conceal (combine with my reading of religious books) and a reader needed to be tasked with decoding the content. I no longer think that is the only writing style. Yes, I think both writing to conceal and reveal are important style to have. Although with work, the latter seems the relevant one.
The kind of reader and writer I am
Perhaps that is the kind you are as well.
I may have finally figured out where the issues lies for me on both accounts. With reading, I think I am a both a micro and use case reader. For writing, it is both not writing the way I think and that a good percentage of my thoughts are not words.
Micro reader
A little unsure that is what it is called but preferring to read only short pieces or read for a limited amount of time. This will change if the volume is of interest. Now I wonder if there is a part of the information overload that contributes to this. It used to be that the process of getting in touch with what you read was very targeted, but now so much of what you should read (often wrong choices) come to you. Lately I tried a deliberate micro-reading effort, pulled out about 8 books and read bit and pieces of each and didn’t feel foggy or tired. I am looking to do more of that. I have also tried opening to random pages and reading, that also worked but think I prefer to course through multiple books.
Use case reader
Similar to being able to read when it resonates with certain interest, reading also comes easy for me when there’s a clear use case. I would read 100's of pages if they were required reading to accomplish a task that is a must do. Again this is not necessarily a single volume of 100’s of pages but it adds up in the end to that on a monthly and annual basis. I will read all available material to understand a concept or method or technique that allows me accomplish a next task. I guess because they are readings to accomplish a different goal, there’s no accounting done for them nor am I tracking the different sources and authors that have enriched my knowledge on that specific topic. I have tried to maintain a tracker but never got off the ground.
Thought writing
Again, not sure the title is the best but that also goes to my point in a sense. Many times we don’t write the way we think (at least the first pass of any content). Trying to edit your thoughts before you get them on paper because you are constantly thinking of an audience. Sometimes, it is not even about these imaginary audiences who don’t really care or may never read your words or acknowledge when they do, it is that we assume that there is a certain way that thought should exist when transformed into text. This damage is perhaps owned by editors and more broadly, dominant style written content in ones space. I think our thoughts are more banal and won’t change because we see writing style we admire from others. I think bluntly and in short burst of inspiration and with questions and leaning towards contradictions — it is not exactly easy to write those out but that is what I should do more off.
Thought composition
If writing begins from thoughts, and my thoughts are a collage of languages of which English is only a part then there is some challenge to overcome. This collage isn’t necessarily a composition of Igbo, Pidgin and English, there are in between that only translate to gestures and impressions, facial and hand movement. Yet others are images and fast moving unidentified objects. To imagine that all of these would be forced out in English, not just English but English written to a specific style and form would make writing challenging. Related though is that the urge and need to write has in the past 8 years or so have been confined to my work. But I am an applied thinker, I am constantly making connections across themes and some written content that would come easily to me, don’t have any work place application. This forces me to shelve them or not even consider the potential and relevance of such written work out there in the world.
Conclusion
The challenge with these ways of reading and writing (and all that which goes into my daily work) is that they don’t share the common units of measurement that allow folks talk about what they have read or written. Or perhaps, I could become intentional and map what a reading journey like this looks like over time. I even wonder if Google Docs for instance can give analytics of the number of words I wrote this year. The unique sentences. The number of new words I have used. How many documents I created and shared in the last year or so. How much edit and changes did it go through.
