The Psychology of Writing

Why do some of us feel compelled to put words on paper or on screens? As a serial nonfiction author specializing in not particularly commercial American cultural history, I certainly do. I admittedly can’t stop writing, even though a big part of me would like to. However, as soon as I finish a book, I start another, sometimes even on the same day. With my uncontrollable urge to repeat the laborious, decidedly financially unrewarding book-writing process over and over, a therapist might suggest I show signs of compulsion.

I recognize there are far worse things to be compelled to do, but I cannot help but wonder what my daily craving to write is all about. Ronald T. Kellogg, at the time a cognitive psychologist at the University of Missouri-Rolla, provided the answer. His 1994 book The Psychology of Writing showed that humans have an innate desire to create meaning in symbolic form, whether through an artistic medium or speech. Those in the emergent field of composition research, which is part of cognitive psychology, have found that people formulate and express their thoughts with written text in order to make sense of abstract ideas. Writing is thus a defining feature of human cognition, Kellogg, now at Saint Louis University, argued, making me feel not so bad about my impulse to construct literature, much like how a beaver builds a dam.

Kellogg went further in his adroit analysis of the psychology of writing, revealing interesting insights into why scribblers like me spend their time alone in a room (or Starbucks) for hours at a time when they might be enjoying life. Writers “confront the challenge of creating coherent ideas in the private realm of thought and mapping those ideas into the public world of linguistic symbols,” he wrote, the process (which he was doing as he wrote those very words) an attempt to “create meaning for themselves and potentially for their readers.” Kellogg added that humans appear to be hard-wired to engage in such a process, making meaning “one of the most unique characteristics of our species.”

I can easily relate to such neurological decoding of the deep desire to translate vague concepts rattling around my brain into a nicely organized text package, complete with an attractive cover. I’ve more than achieved my initial goal to create a body of work that will be around after I am gone. When not writing a book, I’ve dashed off hundreds of articles or blog posts like this one, ensuring that I’ve strung millions of words together in a more or less coherent fashion over the years.

How did I get hooked on this annoying yet at the same time satisfying literary habit? I caught the writing bug after my dissertation was published, and I still enjoy seeing a tangible thing produced that I baked from scratch. Perhaps I write only to please myself, specifically to learn about a subject I’m interested in researching and then offer my own take on it. While hoping that readers respond favorably to my work, I never cater to the marketplace's interests, likely explaining why I’ve never had anything close to a bestseller.

I admit that it’s nice to say, when asked what I do, that I’m an author, as, for whatever reason, there is a certain social currency attached to the occupation. I know I’ll be done one day, having felt I’ve said all I had to say. But, until then, I’ll continue to stack my linguistic bricks on top of each other to manufacture sentences, paragraphs, and pages, too, as Kellogg suggested, to make some sense out of our chaotic world.