Writing About Writing
Think Tank #80
Our world fetishizes consistency.
It’s drilled into us from a young age.
Show up every day. Don’t be late. Sit still. Do your homework. Eat. Sleep. Repeat.
As adults, many of us end up in situations which mimic this familiar pattern, whether it is a ‘day job’ or a self-imposed schedule that we enact to keep ourselves regimented.
And a little structure is a good thing. Life is all about balance, after all. There’s nothing wrong with keeping oneself regimented, so long as a little indulgence is permitted every once in a while. If you have someone who depends on you like a dog or a child, their mental well-being rests upon your ability to strike this balance.
However, modern society (and by ‘modern society’ I admittedly mean my perception of it) seems to have taken this idea a bit too far.
This has messed me up in subtle but perceptible ways, and one of the most insidious is that I think that my creative ‘life’ needs to be consistent as well.
A benchmark of my ‘growth as a writer’ has always been this essay.
At the time of writing it, I thought it was the best thing I’d ever written.
I still really like it (despite some of the phrasing being utterly cringeworthy, looking back). In fact, one of the things that disgusts me about this piece is that I don’t think I can ever write an essay like this again.
It’s like I’ve gotten worse. I used to love writing longform essays with long, sprawling paragraphs. Now, anything over a thousand words seems like a drag. Am I losing my attention span to the modern instant-gratification culture? Am I somehow betraying my younger self by abandoning that style for something ‘easier’?
I guess what I’m asking is if it’s okay to change.
Intellectually, this question seems absurd. Change is observable everywhere, even at the most basic level. Seasons change. The sun rises and sets. People are born, grow old, and die. Some things stay the same—these examples all follow patterns, after all—but isn’t this merely an example of the balance between growth and consistency?
On the subject of patterns, it seems I’m regressing—blogging about my identity crisis like a teenager on MySpace.
Still, the subject still seems worth mentioning—maybe readers can extract some sort of lesson from it. It’s okay to change your writing style. You’re not obligated to create anything. And you’re not betraying your former self by doing a 180 and pursuing something that’s more fun.
After all, isn’t enjoyment the whole point?
On the topic of writing, I found out something recently that was a bit of a surprise to me. These are rare after you pass 70 years, so I still savour it, though it comes from mid-to-late last year.
At the time, I was a regular time waster on Facebook and just investigating Substack. I was also writing a rare blog. The great revelation to me was that because I am a writer, however self-described, I MUST write! And I was scratching my itch on the pages of Facebook.
Once that reality came into my head, I realized I had to get away from Facebook because all the hours of writing I was doing there was being thrown into a bottomless pit of mediocrity. It was a textual conversation where everybody talked at once, and no one listened. Though I had scratched my itch, I had said nothing others listened to. Why was I writing?
I have thrown away my membership to Facebook. I have begun to poke around Substack a little more, finding like-minded people. Many of my fellow-Substackers are only like-minded in the way we look at the written word. Our life circumstances and pathways are quite different, allowing for conversations that mean something. It’s quite a ride. I am being scratched in whole new different ways!