Get Your Hands Dirty

Mini picnic table I made for our garden

Anyone who wants to write well should do stuff with their hands.

Run a band saw. Weed a garden. Unclog a drain. Mow your own yard, instead of paying someone else to do it. Replace a bike chain. Replace a ceiling fan. Make a bird house. Make a free throw.  

I’m not saying we should master all of the above skills, but we should be able to do some of them. And we shouldn’t be afraid to get our hands dirty trying. Anyone who is too precious or navel-gazing to work with their hands is unlikely to produce interesting writing.

In Shop Class as Soulcraft, the philosopher/motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford writes eloquently about the intellectual and emotional pleasure that comes from working with your hands, or as he terms it: “the satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world.” While writing certainly provides the pleasure of making something new, it’s a different type of pleasure than manual work. It’s less concrete.

Language, by definition, is the opposite of concrete. It’s symbolic. A word is a symbol, an intermediary between ourselves and the real world. The word is symbol, while the thing it symbolizes is referent. That’s a helpful dichotomy, I think – symbol versus referent. To be balanced people, we need to spend time with both.

We’re all aware of the hazards of illiteracy, but is there such thing as over-literacy? Perhaps that’s the best way to describe our modern, over-anxious condition. We spend increasingly more time with eyeballs on screens and pages, swimming in an ocean of slippery symbols, rarely interacting with the solid ground of referents. Spend an hour online reading about ideas for home renovations. Then go to your garage and spend an hour making something – inhale sawdust, feel the vibration of a table saw. Which of those hours makes your brain more frenetic and which calms it?

That’s the power of getting our hands dirty. We bypass the abstraction of the symbol and go straight to the referent. And when we encounter the world on its own terms – splinters in your palm, fresh cut grass in your nose – that’s when we start to get a bone-deep understanding of reality, which will inevitably spill over into whatever we’re writing.

A writer who refuses to come down from his ivory tower to play in the dirt will produce sloppy, soft-headed writing. But when we are willing to work with our hands – to be “schooled by reality,” to quote Crawford again – that’s an investment in our worldview (and character) that will make us better writers once we clean up and come back to our desks.