This is a momentary pause from irregularly scheduled programming. I share some of what I’ve been reading, ramble about what I want to write, and list other possible endeavors.
sharp artifacts
I’ve been reading a lot about writing recently (tell the truth but tell it slant), and the themes of craft recur in my brain like a self-conscious broken record. I’ve been thinking about what makes good writing: if my own writing is ever good (and if it is any good, how did I get here? how many years of schooling and essays written and books read have given me this canon?—and if it’s not, well, I suppose I’m pontificating and out of luck here); or if the writers I admire found the courage to say the things I simply do not have the words for.
I’m here to make the audacious claim that some people have really bad prose. Most can write, surely, but it’s didactic and bland. There’s no soul; only coherent logic and pragmatic structure. Their writing is akin to robotic transcription. Functional, yet unfeeling.
Good writers can write, but great writers can wound. They cut you open. Their words are sharp and legible, and in turn, you bleed feelings and memories and psyche. Call it resonance.
Stumbling upon a striking piece of prose is finding a gem in the archeological landfill of human thought. As I read (in the infinite sprawl of internet content), I collect what others have written and catalogue them in a library of artifacts I wish I had the talent to write myself. I thought it’d be nice to share.
Here are some sentences that cut me open in the last three months:
- “A mosaic is a conversation between what is broken.”—finding beauty in a broken world, terry tempest williams
- “I don’t ever talk about it. It’s a bit like a little malformed myth still lodged between my heart and my rib cage.”—”woven”, lidia yuknavitch
- “We want to know how people get close to each other, and how they break apart, what they promise each other and how they fail at those promises, what they want from each other and what happens when they get it.”— “evesdropping”, helena fitzgerald
- “Real art is specific. Particular. It has its own localities. It traces them obsessively. It’s more than just a style. It is a way of seeing. Being.”—”happy accomodations”, brandon taylor
the day job
I was asked recently to describe the kind of writing I do in my daily life, if at all. I described my writing at work as business writing: it spans the transactional to the generative. Transactional in the slack messages and email replies and document comments; a treadmill of following-up on loose ends and exchanging feedback. Generative in the product documentation that establishes the setting of a problem and charts a storyline to resolution.
Writing at work is finding form for a different kind of fiction. It forces concision into boxes of resource optimization and short-attention spans. But it’s also boundless in the way ideas start from nothing and wind their way to something. Most of the time it can be boring, but when done well, it’s fantastical. It’s enchanting to dream up a world where someone’s life is made (marginally) better through the divine intervention of software.
So I do write a sizeable quantity at work. Words pour out of me in every corner and crevice. A lot of it isn’t any good (so say the Google Doc comments), but some of it occasionally feels like striking gold. I hadn’t thought much about this until I considered the twisted irony of spending most of my college years running away from small-group sections and convincing myself that I loved calculus. Though, hand on heart, the Navier-Stokes equations are a gorgeous physical wonder, if I still remembered how to solve them. All I do these days is write, apparently.
let me write you an email
I’m writing this because I’m avoiding the other writing I have to do. The words are harder to find and I haven’t done the requisite thinking to begin the hunt. Until then, here’s my roadmap:
- some proposals, the work-kind-of-writing, that I’m overdue for in the first half of the year. a few goals depend on the constant tension of wanting to finish the thing and desperately needing to summon the energy to do it.
- a longer writing project; ten pages. the closest I’ll get to cracking myself open on the page.
- a eulogy for the two-year anniversary of a certain day in March. I started writing this last year and couldn’t bring myself to get any further in the details; though my memories are fuzzier now (two years), it’s an exorcism I owe to myself. maybe this will be the March.
- a list of goodbyes. I might see some of these people again soon (and I don’t really know if I want to; perhaps).
- some essay about the lyric “and I wake up in the middle of the night / it’s like I can feel time moving” from “nothing new” because I was at the end of twenty-two and that realization sent me spinning for a while.
- maybe emails. I’m chronically terrible at texting / posting in short-form, but emails are a careful craft. The sustained intimacy of mail-order communication. I’ll write you an email if you just ask; it’ll go a lot like this.
stay tuned for
In the spring season, I will:
- make a lavender-scented candle
- seal an envelope with hot wax
- mould a decorative object
- design a typographic poster
- acquire more postcards
- hike up a steeper hill
The weather will soon turn warmer, and I will rekindle the warmth of possibility.