write or wrong

For many years, I've considered myself a writer.  For most of the years before that, I just saw myself as someone who really enjoyed writing.  Now, it's more than something I do.  It's a thing that I am.  I parse conversations as pieces of stories, I get to know people as characters, complete with their arcs (and archetypes).  It's not a very interesting way to live.  It reduces people, industrializes the process of social engagement to something gruesome.  It's the equivalent of a butcher looking at a person and just seeing different cuts of meat.  Or, more commonly, sausage.

So I've been trying to branch out, reminding myself that perhaps people were not placed on the earth purely to distract me until I get bored with them, or even to provide inspiration for whatever wondrous literary works I might dream up in their aftermath.  We are here together for entirely inscrutable reasons, and I need to stop trying to make sense of it, or force a purpose onto it, and just let myself enjoy it.

I used to be obsessed with finding a reason to write.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe I thought it would give me more motivation if I knew, concretely, what I was hoping to accomplish.  It really doesn't matter.  Like Nietzsche, I have learned to reject the false separation of subject from predicate.  A writer writes, it's what he does.  He needs no reason, cannot have a reason, it simply defines his existence.

That sounds pretty good, but it doesn't work.  I know it doesn't work because I react differently to writing different kinds of things.  My approaches to short-form Twitter work, poetry, blogging, and fiction are all fundamentally distinct.  I clearly don't have a unifying motivation to do any of these things, other than boredom, which is as good a reason to do absolutely anything (and therefore not very helpful to think about).

I think it stems from an addiction to verbosity.  In most of my post-secondary education, I was taught that it's a cardinal sin to use a bigger word when a smaller one might do the job.  This is perfectly logical, given what I was studying -- politics and the law, as academic fields, are fighting daily battles to become more inclusive, and less obtuse to the layman.  I think that's a great idea.  These are two horrifyingly complex fields that nevertheless have an enormous bearing on the lives of literally everyone.  Making them easier to understand is an entirely correct objective.

The same cannot perhaps be said of literature.  There are many tens of thousands of direct perspectives on a single sphere, and millions more when we consider the angle of approach as well.  Yet language cannot be limited to three dimensions, and shades of inflection are limitless.  When I write,

I can say what I mean, so you don't have to figure it out,

OR,

I have the potential to unburden myself to a charming degree, cutting to the quick, sparing you the mental exercises necessary to deconstruct each interlocking clause from the next.

And there is no 'right' or 'wrong' in a given spot.  I have to use my judgment in communicating these ideas, which was never the case in college or law school.  There, my judgment was limited to choosing which ideas to communicate.  The words had been decided for me.

Not so here.  Ideas and language interact and, when I'm lucky, give birth to new ideas and more beautiful language.  In between words, after sentences, in the breaks between paragraphs, in those gentle hours after a post has been written, I exhale and find new feelings bubbling forth inside.  I examine what I said, and what it meant, and what it brings out in me, and I learn something about myself.

Like the legal profession, and most other people, every day is a battle to make myself better understood.  What I've missed, I think, is that you aren't the only one I want to understand me.  I want to understand myself, too.  And if you have to read a long, silly, pointless post as part of that process, so be it.  I appreciate you being along for the journey.