Can writing spur a person into action?

What would it look like?

Photo by Limepic on Unsplash

Hey there everyone—

I’m currently trying to answer several questions, and I have no answers, and also too many answers, which is where you come in. They’re about writing and language and action and change.

As I’ve been pondering these questions, and reading lots of other people’s answers to them, I decided to take a crack at putting them out here, because I’d love to know a) if you’re holding these questions too, and if so what it’s like for you to sit with them, and b) if you’ve got your own thoughts about these questions I’d love to hear them, and even start a discussion thread here. 

So, here’s some questions!

Can someone be spurred to action by reading something? Or is the work of writing adjacent to, supportive of, but not a catalyst for someone to act? Have you been spurred into action by reading something? If so, please tell us!

How does one communicate how important it is to address a problem in a way that doesn’t involve language of urgency, or catastrophe, which tends to shut people down and move them into denial or avoidance? How, that is, can we communicate how dire a problem is in a way that continues to make that problem or event approachable, seen as something that can be changed, rather than a steam train coming to run people over?

I got to this question, in part, by thinking about how language itself is being attacked, so much so that words are being evacuated of their meaning. In addition, many words that have force and charge aren’t being used at all, because so few people know what they mean. Which means that a very powerful way of seeing and sense making, of expressing what it’s like to be in our world, is shrinking.

One strategy that political framing experts use to undermine their opponent’s argument is to exaggerate and minimize the issue, often simultaneously. The people who care deeply about issue X are portrayed as threatening, dominating, controlling, all-powerful, or childlike, earnest, utopian, immature, unrealistic . . . addressing issue X would either be absolutely devastating to life as we know it, require all the money we have, with catastrophic consequences for all the other people who don’t care about the issue, or is an absurd waste of time, not nearly as important as issue Y, only of concern to a tiny group of people, etc. 

Thinking about exaggeration and minimization as two sides of the same coin—and noticing just how much writing that is being produced right now participates in this binary—led me to this question: what is the opposite, or the outside, of this binary? How can one communicate deep feeling, help people move into action, even if they don’t know how to solve a problem all the way, show them they’ll be supported in doing so, and make them want to know more? 

I started wondering if specificity is the opposite of exaggeration or minimization. There’s a section in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, for example, where if my memory serves me correctly she’s describing this room in a house that’s been left untouched. She describes every inch of that room. Then, in one short parenthetical moment, she tells us the person who lived in the house has died in the War. Then she goes back to describing the room. The shock is that the person died and she just put it in there as an aside, as if it were nothing. Which, of course, is how death happened in World War I: an entire generation died and each death was treated as if it were nothing in the grand scheme of War. So many writers of Literary Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance grappled with the question of language, after it had been used to justify and rationalize slaughter. How could they write, after something had happened that was so enormous it seemed to exceed the capacity of language itself?

How can we use language to help make the enormous things that are happening right now, all at once, digestible and approachable, without robbing them of their power and complexity? What kind of writing moves you and why? What writing do you avoid and why? How can we fight back against the kind of language that is causing vast swaths of the U.S. population, as a recent Pew poll revealed, to turn away from reading altogether, because they say they find the exaggeration exhausting?

Ok! Thanks for reading! I mean it! I do hope you’ll write back, but I get it if you can’t.

Stay safe out there this week.

xo

Rebecca