on writing

an essay about why writing is so hard even though words are my favorite things in the world ft. joan didion quotes

Last year I wrote something when I was struggling to come up with ideas for a fiction writing class I was taking. I’ve always struggled with fiction. It feels very presumptuous to me. Why would I have anything in my head that hasn’t been said before, and better, by writers I admire and respect? Let alone going on to wrap it up in some contrived narrative arc that feels so obviously like a ploy to get readers attention or make them think a certain way. This doesn’t just apply to fiction either. My creative process is constantly thwarted by questions of purpose, value, utility. Here’s what I had to say about it at the time:

i can’t write anymore because i can only bring myself to think about what i know to be true, any explanation of which comes out as circuitous rambling of mundanity and pretension. writing is not an ethical practice and i don’t consider myself to be a particularly ethical person so it never used to bother me. in the face of these truths that seem to have only one logical conclusion my stomach turns at the thought of creating, who am i to disrupt the universe, etc. i am uncomfortable with playing god. how do we know that the pain we inflict upon our characters does not manifest within us? or that it does not come to exist in a literal sense somewhere nearby or far away? in fact, i might argue that it does, necessarily, and why would i want to create more pain? there is plenty. i know that everything is meaningful, yet the meaning is clearly senseless and disordered, so how am i supposed to create something with meaning if i already know how all of the stories go? if i know that moments of wonder and ecstasy can always be found in darkness? and darkness lurks and strikes as reliably as the tides follow the moon? i saw two ravens yesterday, hopping along the side of the road. one of them was eating a french fry. i have nothing more to say on it. writers are always trying to put words to experience, and i am frustrated with the futility of this. language is too inadequate for understanding. i can try to explain to you how i feel and why i feel that way and all the things that have ever happened to me and you will come away with an experience defined by your own selfhood, there is no way of preventing this. sure, people can find comfort and relatability and empathy in stories, to an extent, which is perfectly fine. it’s just not what i feel compelled to do. my narcissism is speaking now, but i want to make people see. it’s an impossible task because people will only see what they are capable of seeing. the creative process is full of contradictions that i can’t make sense of. i want to disturb, to shake, to change, yet i also don’t want to hurt. i say i know how all of the stories go, but i cant make my own, not one that feels worth the drive. i can start a story but i can never finish it. i can’t take myself out of my perspective, so all the stories are really about me, which might be why i find them so tiresome. i’m so tired of tearing myself apart and fracking my organs for the sake of content, please find me interesting, god forgive my obsessions and grudges. i am bored of labels and categories and pathologies, the inclination to immediately jump to standardized definitions of existence. perhaps what i am really tired of is how frantically we grasp for connections, how we pull the strings and knot them and step all over them. i wish we could all take a step back and see what it would be like if we stopped forcing it to be a certain way. there will always be connections that are moving and changing and rhythms that we can never fully understand, and i dont care about progress and inventions and power. what if we stopped interfering with the moving parts and just let them move by themselves? what if we could accept that none of it makes sense and stopped seeing Control as comfort? i’m trying to watch it and i am fascinated by how certain things fall into place and others fall apart, and how neither outcome is ever final. truth is change. this is the only comfort i have found.

I posted a screenshot of this existential word vomit on my instagram story after I wrote it. Later it would end up featured in a short story I wrote for that same fiction writing class as a scrawled note crumpled up in the bottom of a character’s camping backpack. Now I’m putting it here. I think it encapsulates the breadth of my writing anxieties fairly thoroughly, and I think it’s important for you to understand where I am coming from here— I feel like I’ve been dancing in circles trying to hit the right marks, intellectualizing everything to an extent that the voice in my brain makes me roll my eyes. Will this bitch ever shut up and just make something? Therapists have told me I’m self aware and reflective like it’s a good thing, but I’ve been paralyzed by fear of being unoriginal, uncreative, boring, cringe, unqualified, what the fuck do I know other than myself? Even that feels daunting to try to capture in words. I’m scared to cut too deep and spill myself everywhere, staining the sheets of the bed I’ve made myself.

But. I have to write. I have to make the cut or the words lay flimsy and flat, a layer of fragile skin, the blood running beneath all thick and syrupy and straining uncomfortably against my veins. Maybe I need to celebrate ugliness, do away with the aesthetics that provide a temporary comfort of make believe but fade cruelly back into reality. I want to think and be interesting. Although that desire in itself is a sort of aesthetic, isn’t it? The fantasy of others furrowing their brows inquisitively over my work, meeting with contemporaries in dimly lit bars to discuss the intricacies of the human condition and art in the twenty-first century like characters in a Sally Rooney novel. It is a nice thought that I could create something that would allow another person to see something true about me and the world and themself and have those connections mean something. I long for the power to create something that alters the course of my life, through creating relationships or receiving validation or just being seen for a moment. I don’t care so much about being remembered. I just want the confidence and connections to make myself visible. It all sounds very selfish, I know. I’m constantly thinking about this Joan Didion quote¹ that partially inspired my writing rant last year:

“In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.”

I don’t claim to be a journalist. I was never very good at it when I used to write for school papers, never quick enough. I like to sit on things and stew over them and make tiny changes over long stretches of time and think through every possible way I could be interpreted. I like to use the same block of text I wrote a year ago for multiple projects, plagiarizing my own work and experimenting with how different contexts change the original work. But even outside of journalism, Didion’s sentiment rings true: writers are always selling somebody out².

Perhaps my problem is that I lack an agenda with my work, some motivator that drives my narrative along, leaving me stuck in this self centered idea purgatory that makes me doubt if there’s any point saying something if I don’t have some strong force of will behind it. I am trying to move past this. I know in my head that there is inherent value to making things and using language and expressing humanness regardless of how important or unique the idea. But I am a very critical reader, and naturally that criticism becomes a million times crueler and more intense when directed at my own work. I’m rambling now, but that is a big reason I started this newsletter. To get over myself a little bit and just write something.

Thanks for reading. I’m glad you’re here on this weird bumbling path towards finding my writing style on here- I appreciate you making it this far.

J

1. https://lithub.com/joan-didion-why-i-write/

2. A Preface, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, pg xxv