"Writing is a radical loss of certainty"

“Writing is a radical loss of certainty.” –Nancy Sommers

Writing is a loss of certainty. If we are supposed to write about what we know, than we can only truly write about ourselves. But do we know everything about ourselves? I don’t think we really do. Generally, children don’t remember anything before they are two years old, so how are we supposed to know about that. And little things here and there are thrown out of proportion, especially during the teen years. That is why I agree with Nancy Sommors, that “Writing is a radical loss of certainty.”

Let’s’ break down this sentence. The definition of certainty is “known or proved to be true” according to www.merrriamwebster.com . Radical, according to the same source means, “ending or disposed to make extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions”. While loss means “failure to gain, win, obtain, or utilize”. And the definition of writing is “to make a permanent impression of”. By breaking the sentence down, we learn that the sentence as a whole means, “to make a permanent impression of extreme change in existing views, habits, condition or institutions in the failure to gain, win obtain or utilize what is known or proved to be true.”

In simple words, “writing is a radical loss of certainty” means “to make a permanent impression of extreme change within your beliefs because you fail to obtain or utilize the knowledge that you posses within those beliefs.”

When writing a paper, the student doesn’t know all of the facts, thus, he cannot proclaim to be a professional at what it is that he is writing. The teen telling a story of the encounter with her now “ex-boyfriend” cannot give all of the facts, only her side of them. And the poet, the poet can only know her feelings and what possesses those feelings. But she cannot be certain that that what she is writing is true for the person she is writing of. And is she being overdramatic when she writes that “his blue eyes are as deep as the ocean”? Of course she is. But can we picture what she is writing, and do we believe her, if only for the moment? Of course we do. The poet is writing what she knows, and what she knows is what she feels, what she perceives about this stranger she is writing about. Know does the poet really, truly believe that the subject in which she is writing about really has blue eyes, no she doesn’t. That’s what makes her writing an extreme change within her beliefs. She dramatizes the knowledge that she posses, making it radical and not certain.

In writing, we tend to dramatize what is we are writing about. We end up making a change in what we believe by writing something that we don’t believe; or at least we leave the impression that we don’t believe in something that we actually do by writing the contradiction to it. But because we fail utilize the knowledge of what we know is true in our writing and use it correctly. Once we do this, our writing won’t be “a radical loss of certainty”, which it is now. Why is this way now, because we just want to get through what we are writing most of the time, or bring drama to what we are writing in order to make it more interesting to the reader. Thus, I agree with Sommers quote in that “writing is a radical loss of certainty” because “only fools are positive.” (Moe Howard)