The Rites of the Righting Writer
Do you have what it takes?
“Riter”
(This isn’t a real word, apparently it’s a name in German, but let’s pretend it is a word 😁).
The act of writing is a ritual. Like any other craft you seek to master, you must continually come back to it in order to make something worth reading.
Think of the careful tracing of letters in kindergarten and first grade, down to the hurried essays and paragraphs in high school and college. These are less of a creative act than a ritualistic one; you write because you must step through the motions to gain a diploma or pass a class, or simply to be able to form the letters correctly. All writers start as “riters.”
Righter
But as your writing blooms, as you gain your voice, something emerges. By the teenage years you start to see the wrongs that permeate the world, much of them human made. You take pen to paper, or key presses to word processor, to correct what you perceive as wrong.
On social media and in angry texts, you seek to right the wrongs and ills you perceive in the world. You are a righter.
And some of the deepest wrongs are simply ignorance, things that people do not know or don’t know that they don’t know.
Challenging people and debating them is not the best path to righting a wrong. Showing them Truth is. Either in a story or with facts and figures, the righter shows, but does not tell.
The righter doesn’t want to win, but wants the world to be better.
Writer
If you only work on your craft sparingly, you are a hobbyist. You use writing to communicate but you have no agenda to speak of, and you certainly don’t put in hours a day of writing. It is simply a means to an end, a very important need in a world dominated by thoughts and writing. You have stopped practicing the rituals of writing.
Maybe politics and “being right” doesn’t matter to you anymore. Or maybe you get so deep into debates you fail to see that you are making the other side dig in, not give way. You have lost the need to right.
But if you keep the ritual alive of writing every chance you get, and you bring with it the desire to bring Truth into the world, then you are a writer. Or at least an aspiring one.
So write. In a journal, on a scrap of paper, on the web. Or write music or create art, writing for a different medium. Create the vision you want each day, with each stroke, and each keypress. Because the person who needs to be righted by your own writing is you, and it is only done through the ritualistic act of seeking to right the world.
Thanks for reading!
