In this episode of The Writing Coach podcast, host Kevin T. Johns explores the power and magic of words. He discusses how words have the ability to shape our understanding of reality and perception. Through examples from language evolution, psychology, and literature, Kevin illustrates how the introduction of new words and terms can completely change cultural conversations and perspectives over time.
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The Writing Coach Episode #202 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #202 Transcript
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Hello, beloved listeners and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always writing coach Kevin T. Johns here.
We are gearing up for the next round of Story Plan Intensive. It’s going to be taking place this June. Story Plan Intensive is my four-week program that will help you create an incredible outline for your book in 30 days or less. It is a free program that features daily training videos, weekly homework assignments, and a community of engaged writers just like you. To get signed up for the June edition of Story Plan Intensive, head on over to my website, www.kevintjohns.com/story-plan-intensive.
If you know me, you know that I am not that woowoo a writing coach or that woo a person when it comes to art and writing. I’m really a nuts and bolts type of coach. I really think that the fundamentals are where everything starts. And that might seem obvious, but for a lot of people, they think creativity starts in the imagination, in the Muse, and in inspiration. Whereas I truly believe that inspiration arrives in the doing. Do the work, and the creativity comes to you. You don’t wait around for the creativity to then stimulate the work.
That said, while I’m very much a hard hat, go-to-work type of writer and writing coach, I do fully acknowledge that words are magic. In fact, I think that’s so obvious that sometimes I assume we all know that. On a recent coaching call, I threw that out there. I said something about writing being magic and how we can use words to determine our lives. One of my clients was like, “What? What was that, Kevin?” And I realized, oh, maybe not everyone knows that words are obviously magic. So I thought I’d talk a little bit about it on today’s podcast episode.
On the most fundamental level, writing is the process of taking nothing and turning it into something. An idea, this intangible thing floating around in our heads, ends up being a book, this physical object that you can hold, that you can give to others. When they open it, they can hear the words that you wrote in their heads, and they can go on the journey that originally existed only in your mind. That’s a pretty magical thing in and of itself.
Of course, there’s a long understanding of the relationship between magic and words. When we think about magic, it’s often rooted in spells: the recitation of specific language in hopes of evoking some sort of transformation or impact in the real world. In fairy tales, we get something like Rumpelstiltskin, where knowing someone’s name gives you power over them. The name, the word, has a magical element to it. And while that’s all related to storytelling, for the most part, there are people performing magical spells in the real world.
Where we might see this even more so is in traditional religious prayer, where people are reciting words, reciting phrases, speaking to their deity in hopes of having an impact on the real world. That’s magic. You can call it spirituality, you can call it whatever you want, but if you think that reciting certain words is going to have an impact on your reality, that’s magic. The whole argument I’m going to make in this podcast is that words do make an impact on reality. Words, in fact, define reality.
Let’s talk about the word “woke,” for example. This is a word that’s evolved in the last 10 years and has really come into the popular vernacular. It’s largely used by the right as an insult against socially conscious leftists. For example, there was a Marvel television series that came out recently called Echo. Critics of it pointed out how it was just woke pandering because it was about an indigenous woman, a diverse character, a minority, and she is disabled; she is deaf. They were like, “Oh, here’s Marvel again, pandering to the woke audiences.”
But here’s the thing. I wrote my master’s thesis on the character of Echo, whatever it was, 25 years ago, before the word “woke” existed and the whole ideology and political argument around wokeness did not exist. I spent months and months writing, thinking, researching, studying this character of Echo, and never once was there any consideration that this was somehow pandering to the leftist masses. In fact, one of the issues that my advisor wanted me to address was this concept of Orientalism, which is like white authors using diverse characters in an exploitive manner.
The point being, it was like the concern was that Echo wasn’t sensitive enough. And now people are saying, “Oh, Echo is just pandering to the sensitive snowflakes out there.” The point being, when I was studying Echo, it was a completely different conversation. Part of the reason the conversation was so different was because the word “woke” didn’t exist in 2004 when I was writing my master’s thesis. So, I guess it was 20 years ago, not 30 years ago. Man, I don’t know, the years go by so fast.
That’s an example of how the entire way a work of art might be viewed and the context in which it might be discussed becomes massively different when separated by not just 20 years, but by new words, new language.
Here’s a more simple example, or a less contemporary example. Did you know that for a very long time, the color orange did not exist in the English language? Orange was just considered a light red or, at a certain point, probably became a dark yellow. So there was no orange, there were just variants of red and yellow. Then what happened was, as British people were traveling and going to other nations and colonizing, people were starting to interact with other cultures. They brought back the fruit, oranges, to England. Oranges were called oranges because that was what the fruit was called, not because of the color. But once the fruit orange existed in the British consciousness, the color orange existed.
So there’s an example of how the idea of the very existence of a color did not exist until we had a word for it. That word came from a fruit of that color. That’s the magic of words. That’s how the entire way we see even the color spectrum, the spectrum in which we experience reality, becomes determined by language.
This is why things like self-affirmations and positive self-talk can be really powerful. This is also why mentorship, guidance, and coaching can be super powerful because people giving you words, particularly positive words, can push your reality in a positive direction.
Stoics long understood the power of language to define their reality. There’s the concept of memento mori, which is the idea that remembering you’re going to die helps you appreciate the moment more, appreciate life more. When you don’t remind yourself about death, maybe you just take everything for granted, or maybe you even become negative about life. But when you remember the alternative is death, it can change your take on things, it can change the way you see the world.
Over the last 60 years, cognitive behavioral therapy has really become a prevalent form of psychological treatment. It’s being used for all sorts of things like depression, anxiety, alcohol and drug abuse, marital problems, eating disorders, even severe mental illness. The idea of cognitive behavioral therapy is really working to recognize the distortions in our thinking and those unhelpful thought patterns that are creating problems in our lives. And what are thought patterns? They are words. Most people’s thoughts take place via language. I understand there are some people that don’t have an inner voice, but my understanding is that this is pretty rare and that most of us are talking to ourselves in our heads. We’re using words to create our reality. Cognitive behavioral therapy gets in there and says, “Hey, what if we reevaluate those words? What if we look at the way you’re thinking about life and situations and perhaps turn things to the good?” Again, there’s words being magic; there’s words being used to cure physical illnesses, addictions, depressions.
One of the issues here is that human beings are exponentially drawn to the negative. At one point, I was ghostwriting a leadership business book, and I remember we were looking at some statistics. It was saying something like, if you say something negative to an employee, you can’t just say something positive as well to reestablish the status quo. It was something like it takes four or five positive comments to bring an employee back to equilibrium after giving them a negative comment. This is because we overweight the negative. When we see negative things, when we experience negative things in our lives, our brains and our biology apply more meaning to it than to our positive experiences.
Why? Well, this is a biological imperative; it’s how our ancestors survived. The humans who paid more attention to the saber-toothed tiger, to the giant cliff, and to climbing trees to hide to get fruit were the ones who survived. The more cautious, the ones who remembered negative experiences and learned from them, are who survived in the wild. That’s our great, great, great, great ancestors. But now we live in this extraordinarily safe, modern society, and yet biologically, we’re still constantly on the lookout for dangers to ourselves; we’re constantly drawn to the negative.
One of the issues with that is when it comes to media, when it comes to information sharing, we’re drawn to the negative. Of course, we see this online, and particularly in social media. When social media was invented over a decade ago, everyone thought it was going to be this beautiful, wonderful technology that largely, through words, brings people together. But as social media was organized around algorithms that preferenced popular content, what happened was the negative kept getting promoted because that’s what we pay attention to, because that’s our biological imperative. The internet, and social media in particular, became a cesspool of negativity because negativity is what we pay attention to, and the algorithm pays attention to what we pay attention to.
While it’s easy to blame the algorithm and the internet for all this negativity, the reality is it’s always been like this. Long before the internet and long before social media, in publishing newspapers and the news on television, there was the saying, “If it bleeds, it leads.” If it’s terrible, people will pay more attention to it, and that makes it the more important thing. The problem with that is when we’re constantly reading and interacting with negativity, it creates a negative world around us.
I kind of have a real love-hate relationship with Reddit. I find that Reddit is a good way to keep tabs on what’s happening in society. I remember that on January 6, when the insurrection was happening in America, I found out about that through Reddit. I’m not a big user of something like Twitter because of all the negativity, but Reddit is a place where I can keep tabs, at least somewhat, on what’s going on in the world. All the same, it’s quite negative. The popular posts are normally the ones where people are upset about something or shaming someone or sharing a negative experience.
We see this even more so on YouTube. I recently watched a really great analytical video on YouTube on a channel called Nerdstalgic, which tends to talk about movies and television shows. I’ve really enjoyed the analysis; I thought it was really intelligent, upbeat, and interesting. But when I looked at the other videos on the channel, it had various different types of videos. It had videos titled, “This Didn’t Work,” and then it would say, like, “The Original Way They Portrayed Andy on The Office.” There’s another series of videos called “Why They Fired So-and-So,” like “Why They Fired the Original Actor Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings Movies.” Then they have a series called “Why Such-and-Such Failed.” YouTube is all about giving people what they want. Nerdstalgic looks like an extremely popular channel. And how do you get popular? By giving people what they like, what they click on, and what the algorithm likes. That’s why you end up with videos that are all “This Didn’t Work,” “Why So-and-So Was Fired,” “Why Such-and-Such Failed”—negativity, negativity, negativity.
To be fair, they also have a series called “The Perfect Episode of Such-and-Such.” But as you can see, we get three negative types of videos for every one positive type of video. So what am I getting at here? I’m getting at words are extremely powerful. Words can alter reality. Writing is the process of taking that something that didn’t exist and turning it into a physical object. That’s a very powerful thing. Those words impact the way we see the world. Whether you’re a scarcity person or an abundance person, whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist, whether you think things are getting better or worse, all of that is going to be determined by the media that you’re experiencing, the books that you’re reading, the people that you’re talking with, and the things that you’re talking about.
So, I’m a nuts and bolts writing coach. I believe in the fundamentals. I’m not a big woowoo guy, but I do believe that words are magic. I believe that words are powerful. Be careful both how you wield them and how you experience them.
All right, I’m excited. I’m getting geared up for the June 2024 edition of Story Plan Intensive. To get signed up for that free program, it’s four weeks of training videos, homework assignments, and community. Head on over to www.kevintjohns.com/story-plan-intensive.
That’s it for this episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button so that I can see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
