In Convo #1: How I Write

Whenever I sit down to write something, I begin a rigorous state of focus where I can actually feel my brain straining from the stress I put myself under. There’s a reason for this: for some odd reason, I am not the biggest fan of going back and revising my work a bunch of times. I’ve always known how crucial editing and revising is in the field of writing, it’s a delicate process that forces you to read between your own margins and find mistakes you missed the first time. I shy away from it, like a baby being force fed a vegetable, because I hold so much against myself. I never want to make mistakes. 

Mistakes are inevitable though, even with a sit-down heavy concentration on the thing you are making/doing. I seem to tell myself that if I don’t make mistakes on the first lap, I won’t have to go back around for the second and third. With that mindset, I read out every sentence I am about to write inside of my head before typing it out, trying to cobble together words and phrases that sound sophisticated and relevant to what I’m writing. This way I won’t make many mistakes, because I am speaking the sentence aloud in my head, and my head can’t be wrong. There’s my mistake, because my head can be incorrect and skip over words or misjudge a sentence, and because I don’t go back to revise…those mistakes live on. A direct effect of this writing process I’ve adopted is my sentences becoming drawn out and rambly, where it doesn’t sound conversational and instead embarrassingly contrived. When I write on a forum or a post that’s meant to be read by other people, I want my words to be easily digestible and not loaded with literary slop. 

Before attempting to write more clearly and in tune with how an actual person would speak, I would compare myself endlessly to what I researched in school…

In the majority of my English classes in College I’ve been assigned so many pieces of classic literature, and they all seemed to fall in the same boat reading wise. These weren’t stories tied to a specific genre like fantasy or sci-fi, in fact I think they can only be classified as one thing: an example of how things were in the past. Think of the heavy hitters they taught you in school: To Kill a Mockingbird, Animal Farm, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath. These are pretty old books deemed “classics” by our teachers and professors even though most people find them boring and unrevealing at times. They are meant to be understood and taught instead of understood and enjoyed…at least from most young people’s point of view. Maybe the manner in which they are introduced to us (a classroom setting centered around grades and outdoing your peers) makes it hard for us to enjoy them more. Maybe the time period in which they were written (a world without advanced technology and social media) caused them to be outdated in the face of other more flashy forms of entertainment. 

 I would agree with the majority of people that these classics are slightly boring, but still I persisted in trying to mirror how they were written because of how widely praised they seemed. I remember being in an intro to english studies class my junior year of college. My professor and my classmates were great, top of the class levels of creativity. I remember this causing a little bit of a panic: Shoot, I’m gonna be graduating with these guys, going out and competing with them for writing jobs, If I don’t prove to everyone I can write well my career is basically fried! Every aspect of your writing is borrowed from things you’ve read. Think about it, if the only thing someone read was a Gordon Ramsay cookbook for dummies, chances are their own prose would have a whole lot of culinary terms and curse words. Now, the things we were reading in this English class were basically in the same zone as the “classics” I talked about earlier. Dense and heavy literature that read like the author was writing with six different hands coming from six different minds. If you could guess, yes I started to write like that. Like I was a robotic human translator tasked with confusing the visiting martians instead of helping them out. When my professor sat down next to me to help proofread one of my papers, she turned towards me and said “this is not good”. 

Thank god she did that. Otherwise this post and the others with it might have read a little bit differently. But I’m still not perfect, I still have a strong tendency to compare my writing voice with other more established authors. I still overthink every sentence before I type it to make it perfect the first time. But what matters to me at least is that I am trying to fix these things. The only way for me to become better at writing is to do what I’m doing right now, an informal sense of introspection that doubles as a readable blog post for potential viewers (that’s the hope at least). So maybe once I finish these last couple sentences and complete lap one I will force myself to go back for laps two and three to build a habit. Or maybe I could just post this first draft to the blog (hello there) and keep revising it behind the scenes. I’ll flip a coin or something. 

If I’m able to keep this website up for a few more years, I wonder how differently this type of post would read out. I’m excited at the thought of it, being able to look back on where you were, knowing you’ve come so far. The only way to do that is to get to work, so let it start here.