Several years ago I read somewhere,
“We’re all looking for someone to share our thoughts. And ultimately our beds.”
That resonated with me because it seems so simple but also so profound. I am
one thousand and twenty-four percent better at expressing myself through my
words on paper. Sometimes it is still difficult for me to express exactly how I’m
feeling or what I’m doing or how I’m doing it, whatever I’m writing about in
that specific moment. But if I’m writing my thoughts down, I have time to
revise and edit. It’s like a filter. It’s still me communicating whatever it is
that I’m communicating but it’s a different version of me. This version is much
more well-spoken, more mature maybe. It is candid but in a well-thought-out
sort of way.
I write because, to me, writing is
like living. You just do it. It isn’t something to think about or to delve
into. It’s just a part of me. Since I can remember, I’ve had a pencil in my
hand and a pocket dictionary in the other. My dad used to make my brother and I
learn one new word every week. We had to flip to a random page in the
dictionary and write down the first word we saw and then we had various little
assignments throughout the week so that we could remember whatever word it was
that we flipped to and be able to use it in everyday speech. As a result, I
know words like absquatulate, obnubilate, and solander, none of which I have
ever (besides the week that I learned them) used in everyday speech. My brother abhorred this practice. He is all left brain—he takes pleasure in math, engineering, and
other very boring subjects. I, on the other hand, enjoyed this practice. It
helped me sort of immerse myself in the world of words and it made me think
about language in a creative way. It’s a big
reason I started pursuing writing.
If I could learn anything very
valuable to my writing, it would be to understand when to stop revising. Lots of
people are prone to writing a piece and setting it down forever without ever
looking at it again. I am the complete opposite. I revise and revise (if time
permits, of course) until the thing sounds like it has undergone major plastic
surgery and is still trying to look youthful and spry but fails miserably
because now the lack of flaws makes it all the more obvious that it was full of
them before: wrinkles, small lips, small boobs, the whole shebang. Not to say
that my writing is ever perfect, far from it. But it is to say that when I’m
writing a letter or an essay, I want to learn to not try so hard to make it so polished that it becomes a different
thing than what it was. Wouldn’t we all love it if the letters could just fall
onto the page and that was the end of it? Well, that’s impossible. Letters are
wonderful and evil things. Sometimes they work together and sometimes they don’t.
But sometimes it reads more human when they don’t. I’d like to learn where to
draw the line on revision so I’m not suffocating all the letters that work so
hard to form the words to express my written thought with plastic wordgery.
(Look it up, it’s a word.)
No comments:
Post a Comment