Sucking: The Most Important Thing About Writing
Everyone has their own opinion about what makes for good writing: what you should pay attention to in terms of delivering to your readers, formatting, style, and a million other bullshit boundaries that are supposed to elevate your writing on this mythical pedestal, magically illuminating it in all its prodigious potential.
What they don’t tell you is that your writing should suck—to someone. If you’re not pissing someone off with your content or overusing footnotes as part of your style or breaking the rules, you’re not writing well.
And is it not true that fecund writers such as Dostoevsky or Adrienne Rich or Walter Benjamin would not be nearly as prolific without the biters?
Break the Rules Only If You Know How to Do It Well
I’m not a fan of rules.
I’m that person that has a problem with following printed instructions if I can find a more efficient (read: better) way to do things. I’m the person that questions authority without question because I’ll be damned if I don’t have all the information. I’m that pain in the ass that has to fail at doing it my own way before I get serious about consulting “professionals” unless it’s something I’m quite certain I can’t possibly figure out with a dictionary/Google/etc. In short, I bend and break the rules any damn way I possibly can because I get more work (and better work) done that way.
I’m currently taking a writing course for professional development and while the class is aimed at writing for a certain type of publication, the textbook’s advice on style is maddening.
- Follow these guidelines.
- Readers don’t want to read _____.
- Do this—not that.
- Beginning writers do ____, so avoid that.
- And a million other things that are supposedly right and wrong about writing for a particular audience/demographic/genre.
Follow those prompts only if you ARE a beginning writer uncomfortable with your own abilities. Follow those prompts only if you DON’T ever read. Follow those prompts only if, from a mechanical standpoint, your writing sucks.
However, when it comes to style—in any medium—break the fucking rules. I’ve been writing long enough to know that constraining to the limits of the fucking rules guarantees stilted, underdeveloped, voiceless writing that swandives beyond short of absolutely everything it could be. How do I know this? Because I attempted to stick to such stupid rules for forever. Eventually you realize (hopefully) that some advice is meant to be chucked.
People don’t read David Foster Wallace or Joan Didion or Orhan Pamuk because they play nice, always pick the vanilla cone, and are magically without one kind of neurosis or another. People read these authors because the work isn’t generic, doesn’t follow easy-to-copy structure and formatting, and isn’t running around the mill. (And for what it’s worth, broken rules are fun. It’s fun to write against trend, it’s fun to read against popularity, and both of these activities are how cultural shifts occur.)
One caveat to rule snapping: you have to know how to do it and do it well. If you don’t have some sense of organized chaos upstairs, it’s not going to translate well—not on paper and not on life. You have to have an end destination: what are you hoping to accomplish and why? If you can’t answer this simple question, no one’s going to “get” whatever you’re trying to do. In fact, no one’s going to care.
Filling the static and silence
Loneliness can be overwhelming to the extent of despair. It’s practically an innate need of living things to connect with something or someone that acts not only as a mirror to our subjective experience, but also as validation that our subjective experience is not singular. No matter how desperately we want to believe, at times, that our struggles are ours alone—someone somewhere can, at the very least, relate on some minute level.
I was not a particularly social child growing up. I had no patience for childlike activities or conversations, so it went without saying that discussions with adults were far more enjoyable. The trouble with this, however, lay in the fact that I could never take these discourses home with me or to the playground or the cafeteria or anywhere else where I was supposed to act like a kid among other four-footers. Needless to say, my friends were oft books and chatter limited itself to whatever the singer of the song on the record/radio/cassette tape had to say. That I read Moby Dick over the course of a week in sixth grade might speak more about my isolation than anything else.
My stereo and later the iPod eventually filled the static and silence in later years. There was nothing so holy as hearing someone talk about your life without having ever met you, but telling the story so much more eloquently than you ever believed yourself able. (This remains the case—music connects us to emotions and experiences that are both real and fantasized. Why else would Presidential candidates have pep rally playlists?) Nirvana, Placebo, and The Manic Street Preachers crashed through my version of the 90s and Steppenwolf was my turntable favorite, among others.
Either way, these things took me away from the bubble that I felt I occupied.
Where we previously had books (David Foster Wallace, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Joan Didion) and our favorite bands, the internet and social media cropped up. In a way, the threads that tie us together via social media take what books and bands do and add steroids. Eloquence is one thing, to have an actual conversation with someone that gets it is something else. While you know some vague detail about the people with whom you trade favorite authors or show up at the same shows, the internet affords some speck of anonymity (if desired) when it comes to the gritty, bare bones discussions. You can bare your soul without necessarily having to readily admit it to someone that knows you face to face.
I remember discovering forums and message boards a good ten or fifteen years ago and what a find. You had a handle, you had an avatar, and you could share your secrets without having to share “who” you were. (Of course, now there’s Post Secret, which trumps all of this!) Somehow, even if you felt lonely in your daily life, you could turn on the machine (listen to the bloody modem for those that remember dial-up), and there was suddenly a whole world full of people that “got it.”
People ask now, “Why mess with social media? It seems kind of self-indulgent and a giant waste of time.” I say, why not? It would be like asking, “What’s the point of travelling to other places?” or “Why read the news or magazines?” We are a product of need for other living beings (including plants and animals and whatever else serves as your companion.) Even if one doesn’t particularly like the company of others and prefers a solitary existence (yes, that includes me, the perpetual roommate-free single dweller), we still have a sometimes begrudging need for validation of our existence, of our experience from/by something/someone else.
Even if it’s only a mirror. Figurative or not.
