In an essay in The New York Times, Arthur Krystal brings up something that has long bothered me as a writer. Why am I a good communicator in print, but a somewhat lousy one in person? Conversation is a very different art than writing, even though they both use words. Or put it another way, the process of bringing words out the fingertips takes a different part of the brain than bringing them out of the mouth. According to Krystal:

Like most writers, I seem to be smarter in print than in person. In fact, I am smarter when I’m writing. I don’t claim this merely because there is usually no one around to observe the false starts and groan-inducing sentences that make a mockery of my presumed intelligence, but because when the work is going well, I’m expressing opinions that I’ve never uttered in conversation and that otherwise might never occur to me. Nor am I the first to have this thought, which, naturally, occurred to me while composing. According to Edgar Allan Poe, writing in Graham’s Magazine, “Some Frenchman — possibly Montaigne — says: ‘People talk about thinking, but for my part I never think except when I sit down to write.”

Krystal believes that writing actually creates thoughts–and so it does, in the sense that it helps us organize a jumble of connections and emotions into coherent logic. Writing just engages with thought and language. With speaking, there are all these other things to worry about–whether one is being boring, whether the other person has had a chance to speak, whether a topic is polite to bring up, etc. etc. Also, there’s the matter of time. Ask me a question and I might not know the answer off the top of my head. I usually have to think about it to give you an intelligent answer. Thus, I stumble over my words in person. Allow me to write the answer to the question down and I can manage to sound pretty smart, especially if I can revise the thought a few times to make sure it makes sense.

And so, I am a writer and not a politician.