Writing Makes It “True”

From “How to Leverage Language to Cultivate Your Creative Process” by Nicole He in Killscreen.

I had a concept in my mind—maybe I felt it emotionally, I had a feeling about what this thing is supposed to represent. Now what I’m saying makes it real. After that, I started responding to journalists the next morning. What blew my mind was this: the thing I wrote about my project became true about the project. Many of the things I would say, the lazier journalists would just copy and paste. Weirdly, seeing my own ideas in the media suddenly made them even more true—things about a project being about intimacy, about computers knowing more than we know about ourselves. All of this became true, because someone else was saying things about my project, but based on what I had said about my project.

There’s a lot to be said for putting in the effort of distilling a vague idea into a clear concept and writing it down (and, yes, maybe even sharing it). Not just for a specific project, but for you and your whole career.

There is power in storytelling, both internally and externally.

And, perhaps weirdest of all is that–on the whole–you get to define your own narrative.

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