Weird to have my first post be a meta post about the process of writing. I feel like I should first establish myself as someone who can write, and only then try and explain it.
But this is a post I have in mind, and I am not going to stop now. Meta-writing posts probably do well anyway, there are a lot of writers around here, and you can never get enough of it, of hearing about this thing that you do. Agreeing with a post and hating it, people like doing both, and both have value.
I am writing this in a typewriter fashion too, just letting thoughts spill out, with only editing I am allowing myself being in the moment. Oh, I will fix spelling mistakes later, but I won’t edit, not too much.
Editing sucks. It has become a norm, but you always lose your voice to it, you always lose some of the truth. There are different kinds of editing, structure and sentence, local and global, and some have more value than the others.
In the end it depends on why you write. If I am writing only for myself, as I am, then it doesn’t matter. I do want other people to get some value out of it, but if they don’t, I won’t take it too personally.
I see some writers posting their texts on reddit, looking for feedback. And all the feedback they receive is so generic, so easy, such simple silly things, that it makes you wonder if they could even stand the book if they listened to their own advice. After all that self editing, all that gets out is bland run of the mill pulp. And I don’t want to be a pulp writer.
There is value in sharing. There is value in community. Many of the greats in any area of human life prospered by being part of a community of like minded individuals, while still disagreeing on the specifics. And through that clash of ideas something great arose. Imagine if they had an editor, like modern tabloid writers have.
People want to be writers. When they say that they probably have in mind a single writer archetype, be it King or Vonnegut. But the vast majority of modern writers are internet posters, whose voice gets filtered through an editor, and over the years degraded into nothing until all their sentences are the exactly same, and they are all interchangeable.
Such a global community, a big community, is almost useless. Reddit writing advice is useless unless you want to write, but have nothing to say. If you want to make a community you need people you can trust, and you can’t trust those. They will give advice, but separating the good and bad is impossible.
That’s what people need to decide. Am I willing to sacrifice my thoughts and ideas and truth for wide appeal, or do I want to say something? Gotta pay our bills, so sometimes we have to choose the first one. All creativity gets ground into nothing when you are doing it for a dollar.
Improv is good at teaching these lessons. No one earns money from improv, and improv is all about responding immediately, with the first thing that pops into your mind. With time and deliberate practice you learn to have better thoughts, funnier and more integrated into the overall story, but it always stays the truth. If an improviser seems to doubt themselves, if they stand there too long, too stiff, we see that they are thinking of something, that they are lying, that they are filtering themselves.
Just write. That advice gets overloaded with extra meaning, but really, it is just that. Just write. Live life, and then find some truth in your experiences and put that on paper. Do it every day, and eventually you won’t be able to not put things to paper. That’s how it works for me. I sometimes want to stop time after every sentence in a conversation and write an essay about it. Reality is fractal and there is always an endless amount of things to be said about everything.
So just write, just post it somewhere, don’t care about the consequences, hold on lightly, be an improviser. With practice you will get better, your thoughts will start coming in a story like manner, and people will get some value out of it. This is not a debate anyway, I am not a philosopher in ancient Athens presenting my argument, I am giving you a feel for my truth, my truth, not some universal one, and if you manage to get that feel, without knowing the specifics, the details, I did my job. Of course I will not like most of what I have written now in 10 years, but rare is any book that I have liked 10 years ago and like still. This is an age of cringe and anxiety, amplified by web 2.0, and not looking back is hard. On the other hand, Orpheus had the same problem, so maybe it is not only something from our age.
Just write, don’t look back. And if you do, like Orpheus did, well, try not to next time. And finally, speak what you really believe, if only in that moment.
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Or it’s just me. I like improv and jazz and tabletop rpgs, at least in idea more often than in execution. It feels raw and true, and there are awkward moments and mumbling and being lost. I realize there is always editing to be done, that’s why our brain doesn’t speak directly, but has to go through a mouth. We always edit ourselves, but I am so afraid that something human and true gets lost in that, that we constantly lie and no one knows the truth. And maybe that can be dangerous too. Things that seem like truth, but are just opinions and biases and thoughts coming from anger and hate. That’s how many prominent politicans won their positions, by demagogy and versimilitude instead of real truth, objective or subjective. Or maybe those politicans actually believe what they are saying. That’s what was always the hardest to determine about Trump, does he believe in what he is saying? Logos, ethos, pathos, but man, is it impossible to figure out which is which sometimes. Maybe it is impossible. You can logically explain everything, since you always have to abstract a certain part, since you always have to have certain starting points, certain axioms, and you can always lean on biases anyway.
Or I don’t understand the world. Is it only me? Or does absolute truth really not exist, only relative truth, only ‘my’ truth. If it’s so, then all of the above is true, because it was true in the moment. I change, and a day later I suddenly believe in editing.
This is edited, all of this. I came tomorrow and reread it and added things. In the end, I don’t know what to believe. I hope my voice was not lost, I hope you can feel the rawness, but maybe you can’t. And what’s the use of an article that both tells you to edit and not to edit.
Why am I even writing this? I am not an expert on any of this. I started writing a year ago, and have no idea what I am doing. Or is wanting to write and publish enough of a reason?
Maybe Orpheus was right to turn back. His only mistake was not having a plan B for when things go wrong, and for not knowing himself, that he won’t be able to not turn back. He should have tied himself to Eurydice, or should have brought a gun to shoot Hades.
Sometimes I think humans will never arrive to any truth, anything core to the experience. Maybe that’s the core human condition. Confusion. And accepting that is nirvana. And then something new happens again and you start doubting even that, again. Nirvana equals Samsara, they say. Time is a closed loop.
