What Writing Cannot Do

I help out at the weekly Meet-the-People sessions. Mostly it is paperwork: appeal letters, forms, a rule explained to someone who has read it five times and still cannot make it work for them. It is slow, small work that nobody will ever read about. This blog is the opposite. It has a title, an audience and a record. Lately I have started to wonder which of the two does more.

I have come to think visibility is not the same as power. It took me longer to notice that the same might be true of writing itself. Publishing an argument feels like doing something. It scratches the same itch, the sense that you have played your part. But the resident whose form I filled went home with a solved problem and the reader who nodded along went home unchanged. So did I.

There is a whole culture built on that confusion now: the reposted infographic, the hashtag, the online petition. Pew Research found that about six in ten adults under thirty say social media is important to how they get involved with the causes they care about. None of it is bad. Awareness has to start somewhere. But when it stops there, it is not the same as doing anything. It just feels like it is. Writing, including this blog, is always at risk of becoming part of that culture if it never connects to anything beyond itself.

Writing has done real work on me. It made me read more carefully, argue with myself and admit in public when I was wrong, which is harder than it sounds. A few people have said a post made them see something differently. Ideas do move people eventually and someone has to work them out. But writing meant only to be read cannot change one person's situation today. The paperwork at a session can, but this blog cannot.

Tutoring one student through Project Reperio will never reach the numbers a blog post can and it was never trying to. It is one student, known and answered, not a number. That is showing up, which a blog post never quite manages.

I do both, and try to stay honest about the difference. The writing is where I work out what I think. The Meet-the-People sessions are where I find out whether any of it survives contact with a real person and their actual problem. What these words do, or fail to do, across the table at the sessions matters more to me.