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Writing is greater than speech
Is the quality of my writing, as judged by you the reader, impacted by whether or not I am writing in a suit or my underpants?
Certainly, if I were giving a speech on stage, one outfit would lend me more credibility than the other.
In writing, you do not know if I am tall or short, handsome or ugly, immigrant or US born and bred. In writing, you judge me based only off the merit of my ideas and my ability to convey them.
In speech, you will be distracted by my appearance, by my cadence, by my accent, by my tone. You will lend me credibility by my posture, my hairstyle, the brands I wear, by my expressions.
In speech, I can hide behind the words I project from a microphone, revealing only the parts I want you to hear and see, as a magician producing emotions and reactions in the minds of the crowd. In writing, you are able to decipher my tricks. There is only so much magic I can use, black words on a white page. My ideas are laid bare before you and there is little I can do to dress them up as anything other than what they are. If they fail to support the idea, the idea fails. But in speech, a bad idea may still succeed so long it is spoken from the kind face and curled lips of a serpents tongue.
Which of you, like me, leaves a speech or conversation, and immediately recognizes all the things left unsaid? And yet, as I write this to you, I will check and check again so that what may be said is not left unsaid. In this, the integrity of my heart is presented to you. I left nothing out the I did not deem worthy to giving to you. This is my gift to you the reader, that in reading you might experience me and I you. A knowing that cannot come from the man on stage, who in the shadows of spotlights conceals those pieces and parts of him he wishes not to expose. No, in writing, it is all here. And if it is not, then it is deemed incomplete and judged as such.
On the stage, I am only partly sharing ideas, and the other part acting, embodying the part I want you to believe. In writing, the pretense is removed and all that is left is the transcript, empty of costume and makeup.
Who are you, when nothing is concealed and all is revealed? The speaker wishes you believe he, on the stage, is naked for your judgement, and yet most of the stage and wires and lights remain hidden in curtains and trap doors. No, it’s not the stage but the page where a thinker is revealed. Where ideas are given life or crumpled to be burned in the fire.
The stage declares: here is what I want you to see.
The page presents: here is my child.
The actor leaves the stage exhausted, knowing they put on a good show. The writer sends their soul into the world not knowing whether what’s been tirelessly written will crash into nothingness or take legs and traverse further than the weary writer ever could.
There is room for both the speaker and writer, and I hope not to completely diminish one for the other. But for our collective future, I tend to believe it is the writer who will right the messes of this world. From the humility of a pen, not the lights of a stage.
Speech can change a moment, but writers control history.
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