My Own Bad Writing

I'm sure I would write ten thousand times more if I didn't think my writing was awful. It's as if every facet of my creativity is against using common words and phrases; as if there were not great writers of the past who wrote conservatively. The root of it is probably my perfectionism. How bad is my perfectionism? It took me approximately six months to find a computer that suited me; analogously, I cannot create unless I know it suits me, unless I know it is ideal. It was painful beyond anything I've experienced just to discipline myself to write first drafts as first drafts -- as the skeletons upon which I would return with a fresh mind and add the remaining parts. On the top of a novel I have been neglecting too long in writing there is, in size 48 font, Hemingway's great secret: "All first drafts are shit." The most severe aspect is that I expect myself to write as good as a few of the greatest writers in history; and I still am yet to find a book that I consider, as a unity, to be something written excellently. I demand an ideal of myself I have never seen in the concrete; this is my doorstep to insanity.

But an interesting thing happened just prior to writing this post. I had been for the last hour or so in a shallow depression over my own ability as a philosopher -- not so much my ideas as my perceived inability to present them adaquetely -- when I opened up this laptop, less than a week and a half old, and see extremely lightly shaded blotches at the bottom right of my screen. At this moment my unhappiness that was based on my philosophical abilities transitioned to something as silly as blotches on a screen; I did every possible thing to see if there wasn't an indention in the screen, and eventually I realized it was a momentary fix, something that happened when the screen had been shut a while and needed a few seconds to warm up again. I remember I felt happy; happy in the exact same sense I had been when I had solved much deeper problems in the past, such as the one that just yielded to the screen-related one. I have just proven the relativity of happiness; that happiness has no absolute external attachment. I have always felt this, known it intuitively, but now it has blossomed in a concrete example. I no longer wonder: is it possible that someone can feel the same unhappiness in not having ten dollars as someone else not eating? Yes, it is. There is an adaptation to happiness; what is at first bewildering and proportionately a cause of unhappiness may eventually, through repetition and expectation, become something of a footnote in the book of unhappiness. There are children starving in foreign countries; but there are also spoiled American adolescents -- there is no reason to think that their unhappiness is not the same, that the former cannot be happier than the latter.

Odd thoughts. In the last four or five days I have written approximately 5800 words, all of which are dedicated to short stories -- a new writing-form for me, inspired by none other than Kafka himself; prior to him I considered short stories to be the historical writer's warm-up to writing novels. But this simply isn't the case. One story was inspired by a horrifyingly beautiful dream I had about a love that promised something wonderful but never actualized; I awoke at 4am, and in the midst of having my thoughts drowned by melancholy I decided to use my pain as a means of expression, essentially a means of communication. Few writers know how to write about love without delving into woods saturated with emotion; I shall at least make an attempt to particularize the experience from my own standing. The whole story is evidence of the humor of God; I am also writing a short story revolving around a murder. And with both the words and feelings are flowing without any obscurity.

At so many moments I have the palpable feeling that writing is something foreign to my capacities; but I know that I'm a better writer than so many people I've read (which could be taken as a bit of circular reasoning: if I write like I think writing should be and consider a good deal of other writers to be subordinate to me, then those who I consider subordinate, in doing the same thing with their writing, can easily conclude the same with me). The thought that precedes my resolution to sit down and write often causes a revulsion in me, and no matter how hard I try to put forth my best effort, I still seem to fall short of what I perceive myself capable of. To read my own work is oftentimes blatantly impossible.

But eventually it will work out. Something will be published, no matter how tarnished the material itself is; people will approve of me -- there is always someone who approves -- and people will disapprove -- just like Stalin, who called Dostoevsky a "superlatively bad writer", or Tolstoy, who considered his writing to be immoral to the point of unreadable --, and I will naturally take the place of those who approve. The perception of my writing will thereby have the possibility of becoming colored with the admiration of others; and this neurotic self-contempt for my writing abilities will become a thing of the past. Or maybe I won't be published. Ever. Maybe the rejection letters will reach the ceiling; maybe they will reproach me for being didactic, pseudo-intellectualistic, flamboyant, pedantic. I could take life a lot less seriously. And maybe this is a goal that is within my power to reach now. Maybe this conviction of a calling is simply a delusion. I don't know.