Rohit Subramanian

I could type 1000 words in an hour or less. I could do it in class while I didn't want to pay attention to the lesson. I could do it sitting on the College bus back home. I could do it while partially watching a cricket match. Writing came easy. It wouldn't win any prizes, but the flow of ideas was smooth. It had a beginning, a middle and an end. 

And then I became an Engineer. 

It didn't happen overnight. Took well over a decade. But slowly, every natural instinct to write was replaced by an urge for perfection. As if, perfect writing has ever existed! 

It is not that facts did not matter before. They always did. But it used to be a smaller piece of what I was writing. When the engineer starts writing, all he wants to do is report facts. Soon several tabs are open on the browser and every word a laborious effort in building towards a conclusion. Because the conclusion is often lost in the stream of data the engineer wants to report. 

I first noticed it after I wrote my Master's thesis. In fact, if I had to trace it back to a single moment or act, it would have to be the need to find and specify a reference for every scientific fact I stated in my thesis. Every sentence, every piece of the hypothesis I was building, that I had not discovered over the course of my own research would have to be cited with a published peer-reviewed reference. When the brain has to constantly look for reference, it stops making leaps of creativity. 

It is a good process. An important process that produces valuable scientific advancement to our Earth. But it is effective especially because it defeats the ability of the brain to create spontaneously. 

The brain has to be coaxed to give up on rules to allow it to flow freely. Because running every rule for each written word brings the brain to a grinding halt. 

Twitter works in a very similar way. For years, writers could ramble on to get to the point. Build up towards a climax page after page. The joy of writing or reading came from the patient development of a situation or context. And Twitter killed that instinct by pushing you to a conclusion in 140 characters. Less is More, they said. The platform was designed for people who wanted to skip the writing, the build up and jump straight to the point without any of the contextualization. Less thinking, less words, more publishing. In recent years, you can go around those limitations by paying for a premium account or stringing threads together, but the Genie cannot go into the bottle. The platform on the whole still runs on short, no context blurbs that get widely shared because they are not rooted deeply in anything specific. 

Somewhere along the way it became harder to write about what I felt because it became more important to write about what I knew. An important distinction because writing what one feels requires no confirmation, no fact check and no external assessment of accuracy. It is also exactly the type of writing an engineer has to avoid at any cost to be taken seriously. 

Da Vinci was famous for being scientifically inquisitive while being an extraordinarily talented artist and is often touted as a remarkable engineer-artist. But the fact is his best work was just artistic reproduction of his scientific experiments and observations. It is a different matter that he applied at a very high level, the techniques employed by artists and his work was so beautiful that observers were enamored by it. His art represented what he knew, not necessarily what he felt. 

The backspace key is another huge factor. A lot of my early writing happened with pen and paper. You could not Ctrl+Shift+Up and Backspace entire lines or paragraphs at a time. You could always scratch and make corrections real time, but you didn't have to start over half a dozen times. Starting over multiple times is the easiest way for your brain to forget what it wanted to say in the first place. Nothing ever comes out right if the likely outcome of the sentence is deletion. It kills the brain. Disincentivizes thinking. It is like looking for a movie to watch on Netflix. You may even land on something interesting, but you'll still keep looking, because who knows what else you may find that might be more exciting. The paradox of choices for where you want a piece of writing to go disappears when you commit to the direction you are taking while putting ink on paper. The physical act of discarding a piece of paper takes a lot more than the act of deleting the first paragraph you have been laboring on for minutes on your digital screen. 

Unlearning to write is the best way to help the brain find its words again. 

Labels: Citizen

# posted by Rohit @ April 02, 2026