Somebody Wrote That

We are bombarded by text all day. It is insane how many words you look at. What's crazier is how much you don't read. There's classic stuff like fine print, nutritional information on food, probably 90% of the writing on any container.

Sometimes our eyes open and we see all the text. You can actually have a really amusing day going around and reading text everywhere. Heck, you could look around your normal places and find tons of text hidden in plain sight. Sometimes there's little jokes and Easter eggs you can find. You'll find that when people know that almost nobody reads stuff, they can get away with a lot.

And that leads into the biggest aspect that we all ignore: Every single word you come across was written by somebody. That manual for your car/power drill/refrigerator that you don't read, your warranties and other legal documents, all the junk mail that you get with credit card offers and other people asking for your money, all of that stuff was made by a human being (probably a few of them, actually).

It's an amazing thing to consider: how much stuff has been written. Of course most of it is not art in any sense, but it is people writing, and people getting paid to write, at that. It may not seem glorious, but to some extent, being paid at all to do writing is impressive. Not everybody gets to write something that takes thought, especially material that reaches the general public.

If you want to be a professional writer, every step you take forward, no matter how small, is a step in the right direction.