the sort of writer i am

Okay, when I started this I didn’t intend it to be a newsletter about writing. That it’s called words., and the first three issues being writing-related, is less an indication of my intention and more a sign of what’s been lurking in the back of my mind these days.

Today, while most of my brain was trying to get actual work done, a little corner of it was mulling over what sort of writer I think I am. It finally hit me while I was in the Coffee Bean—where I had decamped to in the hopes that being around people would shame me into actually doing something instead of watching YouTube videos and playing my new cat-themed idle game—that one thing I’ve always taken some pride in with my writing was simplicity and clarity. And I’m annoyed because I feel like some of that has been slipping away.

Back when I was doing my Masters, I’d get really annoyed with academwank, which is when an academic with something perfectly logical, incisive and important to say can’t just come out and say it. Instead, they have to use the most convoluted sentences known to mankind—often coining befuddling new terminology for concepts that can actually be explained in plain language—to express something in 15 paragraphs over two pages when one paragraph would have been more than enough. On multiple occasions I struggled through entire sections of assigned readings only to discover that the conclusion at the end could have been conveyed in the third sentence and I could have moved on with my life hours ago.

I can do academic writing if I want to; as a Media Arts undergraduate I even had a lecturer say she felt I was too comfortable with academic writing, and she wanted me to break out of that tone and style more. But I decided to never, ever write academwank. When I submitted my Masters dissertation, all 20,000 words of it, I think my supervisor said something along the lines of it being “clear” and “engaging”. I don’t remember anything else he said about what I wrote, but I remember that bit because that was what I was most proud of. I had something to say, I conveyed it, the reader got it, we gave each other an intellectual high-five. Job done.

As writers and creatives go, I’m not anywhere near the most well-read or literary. My vocabulary is probably at least 30% less impressive than you’re imagining it to be. I tend not to be able to recite poetry or quote philosophical titans. I made my peace with that a long time ago. My writing will never have the most beautiful flourishes, and that’s okay. What I do ask from myself as a writer, though, is clarity and accessibility. And by that, I mean that my writing should leave the door open for most people to walk through, and that I communicate in a way that cuts through distractions and pointless frills to touch hearts (and minds? Maybe minds, but I tend to be more pleased about hearts.)

It’s really been bugging me, then, that in recent years I feel like I’m becoming less clear, less clean with my writing. I’ve started to second-guess myself more. I overthink even more than I used to. I get paranoid about maybe having missed some sort of mistake. I’ve grown nervous about paraphrasing or putting things in my own words, lest my choice of words inadvertently leaves an opening for hair-splitting civil servants and politicians to pounce. As a result, I feel like my writing has become more clunky, packed with more caveats, more fudging and hedged bets. I prized clarity but now I flounder too much in mud.

It’s annoying on a professional level, of course, because no writer welcomes the suspicion that they’re getting worse and not better at their craft, that their work is becoming clumsier, clunkier. But there’s also the personal and the psychological, the frustration that comes from feeling like I can’t even confidently describe what I see and feel, the anger at my own fear and anxiety.

Of course, this isn’t needless paranoia; it’s not all in my head. There’s good reason for me to feel this way. But it feels like surrender to give in to it completely, which is why I’m still trying to figure out some way to practice and get myself back to a braver place. To be able to own my words a little better than I’m doing now, to not only return to the confidence I used to have in them, but to surpass that and claw my way up to a higher level. This newsletter is a part of this ongoing project.

~ vibes ~

I’ve been trying to get my mother to appreciate Stray Kids for some time but she’s not a fan of rap or hip-hop so their more bombastic title tracks haven’t worked very well. Started playing some of their b-sides while I was over the other day and this was one of the tracks she said she liked. So yes, let’s all enjoy the situationship song (English translation of the lyrics here, you’ll see what I mean), the protagonist is a fuckboy but the song is a banger