Alternate subtitle: The two people who manage to read this will probably either really like it or want to vomit.
Writing is a very personal thing to me. Not because I am revealing the inner-Me through my words or something (I’m not; I checked and I’m pretty sure that if I have an inner-Me, it’s not something I’ll want to reveal through blogspot.com), but because of what writing is. If I say to you that you are a good writer, I am not complimenting you on your effective adherence to grammatical conventions or your skillful selection of adjectives – I am saying something much more personal: this isn’t quite it, but the closest analogue would be saying that you are good at thinking.
I want to be good at thinking (≈ writing).
A lot of people make the mistake of viewing writing as something that writers do just like baseball is something that baseball players do. It’s a school of thought that says leave it up to the journalists and the authors to translate experiences into words. They’re the professionals.
But if you understand writing to be roughly the same as thinking then I don’t imagine you’d be comfortable saying leave the thinking up to the professionals.
Writing is a skill, sure, but what I’m trying to say is that it represents a “skill” that is fundamentally who we are, or who we perceive ourselves to be, as conscious creatures. Here’s maybe a better way of saying it: Putting on your resume that you are good at writing is about as absurd as putting that you are good at thinking.
I don’t mean to give the impression that I view writing as some means through which people showcase their inner experience in all its pristine beauty. I am a fan of crude analogies, and I am about to release a really crude one all over your ass: Writing is like digesting the world and then pooping it out on the floor so that others can smell it. Point being that writing is shit-like because words are blunt, smelly instruments that are far more likely to insult than to communicate what it is that is transpiring in your body.
In short: Words are the waste products of our experiences.
Writing is also like pooping in that, although it often feels pleasant, it is not something I do because it is pleasant. Writing, like pooping, is an urge that I ignore at my own peril.
For me, I really do feel the need to write rather like I feel the need to poo. It is a process of psychospiritual digestion (or something)1 that wouldn’t feel complete unless I dumped it out in a smelly pile of words. And when the urge comes, it’s often hard to resist. I sometimes find myself writing at odd times, either in the middle of the day when I have “better” things to do or late at night when a thought wouldn’t let me sleep. But by and large, I stay pretty regular, doing most of my word excretion after my evening nap and then again right before I go to bed. I’m sure you wanted to know that.
For me it’s writing. For you it may be talking. Or maybe for you verbal excretion is completely unnecessary. That seems unlikely. I imagine it is a pretty basic human thing that whenever we have an experience that is either especially intense or especially frequent, your urge is to excrete words, ideally to someone who will be able to not only tolerate the stench, but to understand what the stench says about what was going on in your body such that they can feel something like what you were feeling, or at least seem to get it. Basically what I’m saying is that we want other people to ingest our poop. Usually our loved ones. Which is weird.
I don’t think I had my first good writepoop until I was 23. Before then, I did a little psychospiritual digestion, mostly through talking with friends, but in hindsight it seems like the first 23 years of my life were rather a lot like being perpetually constipated. And I don’t think it’s until relatively recently – like the past 5 months ish – that I really recognized the virtues of a big fat dump.
Take, for instance, The Look Back. I published this quote a long time ago in a post about bathroom behavior, but reading this again and replacing “poop” with “writing,” it seems so perfect:
Your poop is over. If you're not standing already, physiology dictates that you now do so. Society dictates that you flush. But for many, psychology intercedes, encouraging a look back.
Some look at their poop for signs of colonic dysfunction. Others look out of guilty curiosity, to see what horror their body has wrought. But for many, perhaps even most, the look is to take pride in their creation. In the afterglow of a successful movement, these proud poopers turn and face their demon -- once their tormentor, now their vanquished foe. If it's abnormally big, they feel pride; if it's unusually small, they feel disappointment; if it's terribly messy, they feel artistic. Whatever the case, seeing the poop is closure. The struggle has ended.
It seems contradictory that waste should engender pride. While it poses no threat to the person who created it, and thus should not be viewed negatively, why view it positively? Why should one not view it as a neutral fact of life, no more worthy of comment than breathing?
The simplest explanation of why people like to look at poop stems from the first duality of poop: the more it hurt to hold it in, the better it feels to let it out. To those for whom this feeling is positive, it's only natural to learn to associate the sight of poop with the euphoria.
Logically, I cannot possibly be proud of my writing in an absolute sense because my words are inevitably and always a very smelly approximation of what’s going on inside me. I can only be proud in a relative sense. I can look around and say, hey, my poop isn’t quite as ugly and smelly as other people’s2. Or I can say, hey I’m pretty normal and healthy.
When you understand writing to be poopy, there’s less to be self-conscious about. The only thing that separates me from the DFWs and the Kafkas and the whomevers of the literary world is that they have developed the ability to make their excretions a bit more presentable by introducing a touch of added symmetry or coherence or color or what-have-you.
That’s not true, of course. There are reasons beyond workshop techniques that DFW’s wordpoop is infinitely more compelling than mine. This guy was digesting the world on a level that was so “whole other” that it’s not even visible from the plane I’m pooping on. Right now I’m reading a collection of his non-fiction in the book “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again3,” and in my nerdy spreadsheet I rated his writing one-tenth of a point less than perfect, a 9.9, because in some places he’s just showing off. I’m not going to say that DFW had such digestive power that he managed to poop flawless golden foil-wrapped nuggets with little ribbons on top – they are still just words; and he was wrong a lot of the time; he makes a lot of pretty basic errors of economic logic, for example – I’m just saying that this is where the analogy fails, because the difference between great writing and merely good writing goes beyond mere presentation.
What makes DFW’s writing great (to those who perceive his writing as great) relates to what I am going to call the DFW Theory of Aesthetics, which says that art is only interesting to the extent that it rings psychic cherries in the communicatee, i.e., the extent to which it feels true. And hoo boy does his writing ring my psychic cherries. It feels like there is an intellectual orgasm to be had in almost every paragraph.
Again, this is not the same as saying that DFW’s writing is an accurate representation of reality, or something. I think he was wrong a lot of the time. When people talk about DFW’s writing, they almost always talk about his amazing prose, but I think that’s exactly wrong. What he did so jaw-droppingly well was not presentation but something like digest the parts of the world that I was only subconsciously aware even existed. It’s like he had discovered some exotic new form of nutrition that I could not consciously access but could kind of peek at through his waste products. (Har har.)
And so maybe by now you’re seeing why writing is so personal to me, so you can sort of understand what I’m about to tell you, which is that when I get any kind of external feedback on my writing, I listen pretty (ridiculously) carefully.
The reviews have been mixed. And in fact the reason why I started writing this epic post is because I feel that I am suffering from a pretty severe case of Contradictory or Nebulous Feedback Syndrome.
99% of the comments about my writing seem to fall into one of two buckets:
1. You’re awesome.
2. I don’t get it.4
There are a few people who have actually combined the two, saying they don’t get it but they can tell I’m a good writer. Um, what? No, that makes absolutely no sense. I cannot possibly be simultaneously good and un-gotten.
I recognize that my style is not exactly the easiest to interpret. While I am careful to avoid unnecessarily big words, I have a pesky tendency to be rather abstract. To complicate matters, I have the meandering incoherence of a small child. (Adorably so.) I am also unabashedly hint-y, making regular references that you might not get unless you’ve been reading other posts carefully. To complicate matters further, I am often only half-serious or less.
From what I gather, people want the stuff they read to be either perfectly sincere or perfectly insincere. Mixing the two just ain’t couth. People want blogs to be about opinions5, either directly expressed or indirectly expressed through mockery. I don’t blame them: If I can’t tell what a writer is intending, I am going to be uncomfortable.
Here’s the thing: I, the writer, rarely know what I’m intending! In a sense, the half-seriousness is often sincere, because I often really don’t have an opinion on what I’m saying. But if you ask me, that’s the most interesting kind of writing.
Sorry to circle back around to this, but please keep in mind that I am taking a metaphorical dump right now. (And you are staring at a metaphorical turd.) I don’t know what’s going to come out. The end result could be remarkably satisfying or bitterly unsatisfying for me, and god knows what it will be for you. I can (and do) try to whip it up into something a bit more presentable, but no amount of sprucing up is going to hide the fact that the medium I am dealing in is feces.
Some of the feedback in the “you’re awesome” category has been intensely flattering. A number of people have told me this blog is their favorite, and I believe a handful of them. And similarly for suggestions that I write a book. One guy whose writing I happen to really admire sent me an email with very specific feedback w/r/t to being the most starred blog in his Google Reader, saying that the entertainment value exceeds that of his favorite TV show, and also seemingly sincerely suggesting that I apply to be a writer for SNL.
What’s more gratifying than the specifics of the compliments is the feeling of being gotten. No words.
But let’s be realistic: This blog is very, very cultish. It has a readership approximately the size of a college auditorium6. On the one hand, it really pads my ego to think about that because only a few of those readers knew me pre-blog. I.e., hundreds of the people are reading not out of some subtle social obligation to pretend that they like me but because they genuinely find it worth reading.
On the other hand, I can easily look at the same number as an indictment on my awesomeness. I mean consider that there are about as many people in Raleigh paying thousands of dollars and 45 hours of their life to take one section of an Organic Chem class as there are people in the world who want to spend a few minutes to ingest the most important/interesting things I’ve been thinking about, for free.
I don’t want to give the impression that I’m modest. I’m not. I believe that if you leave me alone in a room with a keyboard that has a serviceable backspace key, I can be pretty smart and funny – like 92nd percentile smart7 and 83rd percentile funny. And I believe I’ve become a heck of a lot smarter and funnier in the 3 years since overcoming constipation8. And I think I’m improving at a faster, rather than a slower, rate.
This post, I’m aware, has narcissism bleeding out the ears. That makes me a little itchy, but it also feels honest. I’m ringing my own psychic cherries, or something.
If there is a point to this post11, it is probably that we humans seem to need to digest experiences, the end result of which is verbal waste products, making things like writing and conversation no ordinary “skills” to be left to professionals, and that probably one of our12 strongest desires is simply to have people smell our poop and kind of like it.
I.e., I’m fragile, so be nice to me.
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1(“or something” is my way of indicating that words suck.)
2(I take the relative not-unpleasantness of my writepoop to mean that there’s something magical about me.)
3(The footnotes in this post are in his honor.)
4(“Over my head” is the phrase typically used.)
5(aren’t there enough of those?)
6(200-250 regulars)
7(this despite my use of the word "smart")
8(If you don’t believe me, check the archives.)9
9(Wait, no, please don’t.)10
10(This is just so I could say I put a footnote on a footnote on a footnote.)
11(there’s not)
12(my)
