Why Writing Scares Us So Much
(1) The Idea: Why Your Writing Doesn’t Sound Like You
A weird paradox haunts us all in writing.
For example, whenever I sit down to write these emails I think: “I know my shit and the paragraphs should just flow out of my fingers, right?”
Wrong. Sometimes the ideas that look pristine and enlightening in our heads typically come out like the babbles of a demon baby.
It’s definitely easier for me to sit down and write nowadays after years of banging my head against the wall, but I have to admit that I’m no stranger to clenching up once I start to work on something that isn’t scribbling in my journal.
Worse, when we write from a place of tension, we stop sounding like ourselves. To cite Stephen King for one of his bombastic examples, we start writing stuff like: John performed an act of excretion instead of John is taking a shit.
Numerous craft books also commented on this problem. For E. B. White, overcomplicating our sentences is an indicator of insecure writing, giving rise to prose that sounds “less direct, less bold and less concise”. We end up putting both ourselves and our readers to sleep.
So for this issue, let’s explore why we tend to clench up and how to ease the tension so that we can embody what we actually sound like on the page.
The way I see it, there are two major roadblocks. 1: The idea is half-baked and 2: we’re too concerned about style.
Let’s start with a half-baked idea. From my experience, the most effective litmus test for how fleshed-out an idea is is to write about it. However elegant the idea is in your head, writing will quickly destroy any delusions of grandeur.
We humans, unlike those AI chatbots, don’t think in a linear fashion. A lot of our light-bulb moments usually come from associating a bunch of ideas together, so when we’re forced to put it into a linear format like writing, we struggle to retrace our steps.
On a deeper level, writing as a practice co-creates the idea with our minds. It’s really an act of translation where fantastical dreams are forced into the daylight of wide-awake language. And just like how we have to squint our eyes a little when we exit a dark room, framing our thoughts into cohesive writing takes a lot more thinking than we’d like to give it.
For example, you can see this a lot when freshmen students write their first essays (I was one of them). The writing is usually stylistically complex (passive voice, subordinating conjunctions, words like henceforth, the whole mixed bag) but it only takes a second to spot the cardinal sin they’ve committed: they have nothing to say. In contrast, though experienced writers use deceptively simple language, each sentence still makes us pause and reflect.
So in order to write with the clarity of the latter, a lot of thinking and editing is required which leads me to the second roadblock.
The obsession with style is closely linked with not having anything to say. I blame this on the Modernists because a lot of their books are stylistic feasts with very little storytelling. So now, stylistic imitators think that as long as their style is great, they don’t need a whole lot to say.
I can see a lot of examples of this from my past writing. An essay I wrote six years ago had this paragraph:
After a while, I realized that I no longer craved that luxury called certainty. Hence, every slow re-read only made me more patient and deliberate.
It’s not too bad, but it’s overwritten for a blog post. If I re-write it now it’ll cut straight to the point:
I didn’t care about certainty because each re-read reveals how much I didn’t know.
See, with a long-winded sentence, the key idea is usually pretty simple. But if we can’t swallow our pride and abandon style for substance, then we’re just like that guy who knows a few words in a foreign language but masks his ignorance with an exaggerated accent.
And here’s the biggest paradox of all: if we focus on what we’re trying to say, our style will naturally emerge.
This was a big aha moment in craft and I’d like to share it with you straight from the source:
"A careful and honest writer does not need to worry about style. As you become proficient in the use of language, your style will emerge, because you yourself will emerge, and when this happens you will find it increasingly easy to break through the barriers that seperate you from other minds, other hearts-which is, of course, the purpose of writing, as well as its principal reward."
-E.B. White, The Elements of Style
Brilliant, right?
And leads us to the end of our issue and the solution to this paradox. Sometimes, the only way to start sounding like ourselves on the page is to stop trying to sound like ourselves. In this case, style is a sweet reward once we’ve done the hard work of figuring out what we’re really trying to say.
(2) The Prompts:
1: Compare your writing in a journal with your work in a formal setting Do they sound different? Do you notice yourself clenching up while sneaking in fluff to sound more impressive?
2: Try to explain an idea you know really well in your journal The best place to start is to explain something you know well in the simplest words and see where it takes you. Get a feel for it and pretend you’re writing to a pen pal about your recent obsession. Sometimes, this is all you need to allow your organic style to emerge without forcing it.
