My Wholly Unoriginal Manifesto

February 15, 2022

So! Writing is awful. Send newsletter.

That’s clearly an overstatement, but it’s how I’ve felt for the past couple of months… years… lifetimes. I’m not sure when it started, but I suppose picking up a pencil damned me to this fate as a small child. But it’s become especially apparent as an adult; more specifically, as a college graduate with further academic ambitions. My lifelong writing block has moved into the center of my focus, and I’ve had to address it somehow.

The first thing I’ve come to decide is that writing is deceptively hard, and that’s caused by a few different forces, some of which I’ll expand on further, but for now, I have this non-exhaustive list.

I have severe ADHD that was untreated for 24 years and has been successfully treated for two more. There’s a whiplash to re-learning how to do things with so much of what inhibited me under control now.
The actual medium of writing is outmoded by how it’s shared. By that, I mean that writing digitally is completely different than writing analog, and the artistry of both requires nuance.
Grammer adn speling are anoying:

And so, so, so much more. Nevertheless, I succeeded in conning all of my teachers and professors up to this point – some very smart and accomplished people – that I can do this with some degree of acuity. Worse, I’ve conned myself! But if the con is so long, then does that mean the long con has been ret-conned into the con(struct) of reality?

I’d say it has.

The deception of writing, for me, comes in the mental exercise of writing. I’ve never been a fanciful writer who sought out the realms of fiction for my creation and toil. No no, I prefer the abject suffering of non-fiction. And in doing so, I’ve chained myself to the concept of an “audience.” There’s this active questioning that’s always going on in my head, with every word my fingers bang out on this keyboard. Why is that?

ADHD is an easy answer to a complicated question, but it fails to account for all of the baggage. We’re trying to unpack a 737, and ADHD is just a gate-checked roll aboard; I need more to pull from than a mental disorder I only learned I had after earning a bachelor’s degree.

I’d argue that the two biggest pallets of luggage are the following:

1. Standardized tests (BORING)

2. Digital platforms (LAME)

Okay, hear me out.

See what I’m doing right now? Addressing “you” directly? This is something I was not supposed to do, according to my sweet grade school teachers. The first memories I have of writing include mind maps, composition paper, and being told to “always remember the reader.” That’s because my first memories of writing were instructions for passing the TAKS Test for Composition, and I hated writing for those things. If you didn’t grow up in Texas in the early-00s, the TAKS test prompts were horrible over-generalized non-questions that asked students to recount their life experiences to adults. Pretty shitty way to teach kids to write, yeah?

As soon as I proved that I was a “master writer,” someone who could pass every TAKS test with a perfect score (something I think I did? Who cares.), I tried to break every single rule. I started sentences with “And,” I addressed the reader directly, I used incomplete sentences, run-on sentences, and did basically everything I could to not write anything like those pointless compositions ever again. But in doing that, specifically, in addressing the reader, I fell into an insidious paradox; addressing the reader directly is just saying the quiet thing loudly. I’m still under the dark cloud of an “audience,” but now I’m just trying to alienate it, to a degree.

Somewhat thankfully, academia weaned me off that aggressive style of writing, but it still comes through occasionally. It certainly has so far, in this piece. But I don’t want to get sucked into this rabbit hole, since I think the digitization of writing has both been my saving grace as a writer, as well as my deepest pitfall.

Now I’m positive that I’m not the first person to say anything like this. Hell, I’m feeling guilty for not being able to point out at least five different people smarter than me who’ve said some version of this exact idea. And there’s an element of the oppressive structure of academia in that, but I want to keep the focus on this concept of “audience.” Digital writing has given me the gift of being exposed to so many incredible writers who manage to reach into my chest and play my heartstrings like they’re getting 100% on “Through the Fire and the Flames” on Guitar Hero 2. They’re inspirational, and knowing that I can reach other people with my own words has done the same for me.

But there’s a flip side to that, namely, the fact that the internet is this unknowably large collection of people, programs, algorithms, and my car’s extended warranty/ies. At least with TAKS, I knew that I was writing for English teachers from the state of Texas. Right now? I have no fucking idea who’s reading this – sorry for the language, if necessary. My “audience” is both everyone and no one, left to me to derive.

That is not a responsibility I have the power to wield. Tobey Maguire, get in here!

There’s this ever present fear I have that something I say will be the match to let the tinderbox of all my insecurities and perceived failures go up like the Hindenburg, because I said the wrong thing. I said something unsubstantiated. I said something insensitive. I said something I didn’t mean. I have no idea who’s reading this, so how can I possibly perfect my prose for prime perception under the panopticon?

I can’t. And I can’t accept that.

At least, I couldn’t. I’m trying to just write in a free-flowing way with this piece, because it’s the only way to address my fear of unknown persecution. Sure, I should probably link some articles or videos. I should’ve read some book. I should’ve done some unknowable something to make my writing better. Fuck that.

A message that resonates with everyone will stick with no one.

I’d be better off throwing Scrabble tiles in a Cuisinart and hitting purée than I would be trying to make my writing “rigorous” or “universal” or “good.” And I mean that last point as both a joke and a serious statement. This piece might suck. Awesome! That’s exactly what I want.

I want to rid myself of this baggage. I want to think of my “audience” as a tool to guide my writing, not as a threat to my personhood and my soul. I want to join the writers who I admire and embrace the possibilities of technology, not let its faults consume me. I want to be a writer, dammit, not some haunted old thing with scraps of brilliant ideas scattered all about his mind.

At some point, I want to expand on all these ideas. I think that they all deserve further inspection, and I would love to engage in conversation about them with whoever has something to say. But right now, I need to cleanse myself of fear. Of the stress of writing as a college grad, as a learned person, as a Twitter account with more followers than accounts followed.

I just want to do this shit, man.

Oh. Guess I did.

Cool, ain’t it?