Why Obama Writes

The power of writing, according to the forty-fourth president

This article is the second in a series. Read part one here.

Long before he found politics, Barack Obama found writing. These days, the world knows Obama as an audaciously hopeful (and popular) former head of state, but as Craig Fehrman explained in Literary Hub, “Obama-the-writer came before Obama-the-candidate.” At every stage of Obama’s improbable journey, the act of writing has helped him make sense of the world around him — and understand where his story fits.

Over the past year, I’ve occasionally sought refuge in old profiles and articles about Obama and his presidency. I do so not to wallow in hope-and-change nostalgia or pretend that the present reality isn’t really happening, but rather to find a little perspective and do a little processing.

As I wrote in May, for many millennials, our coming of age tracked the political trajectory of the Illinois state senator who burst onto the national scene in Boston in 2004. Throughout the Obama era, a lot of us did a lot of figuring out about who we are and what matters to us and how we think about the world. Reflecting on Obama’s story is thus a lens through which we can reflect on our own. It’s a way to process how we ended up wherever we are now, doing whatever it is we’re doing, valuing and believing whatever we’ve come to value and believe. And in my case, at least, diving into the Obama archives is way to consider my own story through the story of someone I admire as a president and as a person — and as a writer.

Figuring out his ‘organizing story’

In the White House, Obama read 10 letters a day from Americans who wrote to him. “If you listen hard enough,” he told Jeanne Marie Laskas, “everybody’s got a sacred story. An organizing story, of who they are and what their place in the world is.” When it comes to discerning and defining one’s own organizing story, a lot of the process is old-fashioned trial and error. You live your life, and hopefully you learn as you go. If you’re lucky, though, you stumble across a tool that helps you figure things out — and maybe makes your world a little clearer.

Different people employ different tools. In recent years, as I’ve attempted to process some of my experiences and challenges and values, writing has been my tool of choice. This written self-exploration was both the foundation of my book, Reframe the Day, and the reason I began writing the book in the first place. When I finished proofreading the manuscript for the final time, in a moment of clarity (or perhaps delirium), I suddenly realized that I’d written much of the book in the first-person plural because I was writing for myself as much as for anyone else. I was writing to discover my organizing story.

Well before he first shared his story with a national television audience, writing served a similar purpose for Barack Obama. As next month’s publication of A Promised Land, the first installment of his post-presidential memoirs, suggests, it still does. Despite the countless articles and speeches he’s written and the millions of books he’s sold — despite the fact that his words have shaped America’s organizing story — Obama knows that writing is more than just a tool for telling stories. It’s also a tool for figuring out what those stories are.

As a young man, Obama had some figuring out to do. Aspiring, in part, to become a novelist, he wrote short stories that served as written explorations of his own identity. “Writing was the way I sorted through a lot of crosscurrents in my life — race, class, family,” he told Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. “And I genuinely believe that it was part of the way in which I was able to integrate all these pieces of myself into something relatively whole.”

The fictional forays that facilitated this sorting may not have been published, but that didn’t matter. They served their purpose. The process of writing them helped Obama make sense of his organizing story. The process provided clarity and understanding. The product was secondary.

The same was true for Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father. When the book was first published, it “got good reviews yet sold only modestly,” Michelle Obama recounted in her own bestselling memoir, Becoming. “But that was ok. The important thing was that Barack had managed to process his life story, snapping together the disparate pieces of his Afro-Kansan-Indonesian-Hawaiian-Chicagoan identity, writing himself into a sort of wholeness this way.”

That process wasn’t easy. “One of the things Obama loved about writing was the way it forced him to clarify what he thought and felt about something,” Craig Fehrman observed. The key word in that sentence is “forced.” The act of writing forces clarity. It forces the writer to take ideas, inclinations, and instincts, and shape them into something more substantive — something real. Or, failing that, it forces the writer to accept that the passing thoughts and fleeting inspirations bouncing around in their brain might not have much substance to them once they emerge from the subconscious — and that such an outcome, while disappointing, can be just as valuable for how it enables the writer to move on.

Writing for the process, not just the product

Other than rage or contempt, it’s rare for Twitter to accurately convey human emotion. But last month, when Obama tweeted that “there’s no feeling like finishing a book, and I’m proud of this one,” his relief was almost palpable.

A Promised Land will be more than just a former commander-in-chief making sense of his thoughts. It’s a way to “safeguard his legacy,” as The New York Times put it, and to defend his record. It’s also a story with an enormous audience. No book, even one written by the most admired man in the world, would get an initial print run of three million copies if it were just a cobbled-together collection of diary entries. (Maybe that’s not true. I, for one, would happily buy a scanned PDF of the yellow legal pads on which Obama handwrites his first drafts.)

In any event, it’s impossible to imagine Obama publishing a book that doesn’t meet his own literary and storytelling standards. But it’s equally impossible to imagine him dedicating so much time to the frustrating, occasionally excruciating, pursuit of writing if he didn’t derive clarity and fulfillment from the pursuit itself.

Picture him in the early 1990s. After graduating from Harvard Law School, “he takes his law degree back to Chicago, where everyone wants a piece of the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review,” as Robert Draper describes in GQ. “Obama has his pick of law firms.” He doesn’t have to write the memoir that ends up tormenting him to the point that his publisher “terminates his [book] contract for failing to meet his deadline.” But he writes it anyway.

Two decades later, Obama has a team of speechwriters working for him. He doesn’t have to spend late nights in the White House writing and rewriting his remarks. But he does anyway.

After leaving office, ex-presidents are perpetually in demand, especially in today’s era of celebrity politicians. Obama doesn’t have to write a good book — or even a coherent book — for it to be a bestseller. But even as leaked accounts suggest that crafting his latest book is proving just as difficult as the first one, he tries to write another book anyway.

At every stage, he keeps writing, even though he struggles with the insidious force that Steven Pressfield calls “Resistance.” Even though he seems to find writing, like politics, an exhausting and maddening endeavor. Even though the person who’s been called America’s “author-in-chief” and “writer-in-chief” has more than a few demands for his time.

The presidency, for those who take it seriously, is one of the hardest jobs in the world. Yet Obama has reserved some of his choicest complaining for a different job. “Writing is just so hard. Painful,” he told Jeanne Marie Laskas. “It’s work. It’s like having homework all the time.” This burden is inseparable from the process of writing. Yet the process is why Obama writes.

Surfacing the subconscious

No writer knows precisely where a particular piece of writing will take them. This article was supposed to be a quick follow-up to a piece I published in May. I planned to spend no more than a couple paragraphs highlighting Obama’s passion for writing. A “quick follow-up” and a “couple paragraphs” turned into dozens of hours reading old magazine profiles and writing two full drafts by hand in an attempt to synthesize my own experience with the anecdotes and ideas I encountered. I didn’t know that this article was the one I actually wanted to write — until I started writing.

The clarity that comes from writing depends on nothing but the act of sitting down and starting. That makes writing one of the few aspects of life for which at least some success is guaranteed. To meet demand for A Promised Land, The New York Times reported that Obama’s publisher would print a million copies in Germany and have them delivered to the United States in “three ships, outfitted with 112 shipping containers.”

My book, meanwhile, required precisely three fewer ocean liners to accommodate demand. I would’ve loved an initial printing of three million copies of Reframe the Day, but that’s not why I wrote the book. I wrote it to make sense of the world. To process my thoughts. To figure out what I think, and to test what I think I think. To bring some order to my conscious mind and dredge up whatever’s lurking in the depths below. To piece together my organizing story.

By the time I finished the first draft of the manuscript that eventually became Reframe the Day, I had already achieved what I set out to achieve: a better understanding of who I am, of what matters to me, of how the world works, and of where my story might fit. That outcome had nothing to do with sales or reviews, and everything to do with clarity and self-discovery.

That is why I write. That is also, I believe, why Obama writes. And that is something I discovered through writing.

This article, “Why Obama Writes”, was originally published in The Writing Cooperative on Medium.