complich8′s journal

The right honorable gentlemen is indebted to his memory for his jokes and his imagination for his facts.
~Richard Brinsley Sheridan

I’ve noticed …

I think the quality and clarity of my writing has been on a steady decline lately. Particularly when it counts — classwork. I got my first paper back in phil 303 (a couple weeks ago, I’ve been sort of mulling it over since then), and it confirmed what I suspected. I used to write “well-written, well-structured and thoughtful” papers. Now I write things deserving of feedback like “This paper isn’t well-written or well structured, but the idea at its center is imaginative and interesting”.

Got me a B+. Which is ok … but the feedback on style is what I find more interesting than the actual grade.

As my gotwoot forum post count climbs (it’s over 1000 now), and as I spend more of my intellectually-engaged downtime either on irc or on forums (as opposed to disengaged time playing games), I’m finding it harder to construct complex and meaningful arguments … particularly arguments that span the course of a couple of pages.

So why is this? There’s been a lot of changes in my lifestyle in the last four of five years. I started fansubbing in mid 2002, doing qc. By 2003, I was doing what amounted to editing and qc work, and that kept up (and kept drifting toward more pure editing) until into like august 2005 (I parted ways with AonE at the end of 2004, and did Futakop Alternative with AnY starting in around march of 2005, ending in probably july or august I guess).

More than that, I’ve spent a lot of time on irc the last four years, and a lot of time on various forums (mainly gotwoot and animesuki). And not a lot of time reading intellectually stimulating well-written stuff in general.

What is it about forums and irc that are so detrimental to my writing style? On the basic level, I think it’s the pacing. Good, clear and precise thinking happens when you give it the time and focus to do it. A clear argument has to have time to solidify, and then be trimmed back to the bare minimum, and be recast as that, and solidify again. It’s not something that you can just spew out on a whim and expect to fly. But on real-time or nearly real-time media (irc and forums, respectively), you don’t really have that time to pace yourself and write clear, thoughtful arguments. Forum threads move too fast, someone else replies with a short, skeletal response that’s roughly equivalent to your own more fleshy reply.

So I guess I’m being influenced by forum/irc culture, learning to toss up vapors and skeletons instead of structurally sound arguments. When in Rome, or something like that?

But I don’t think that’s the sole source of my problem. Rather, it’s a co-conspirator. And that’s where the quotation above comes in.

See, I’m no genius writer. I have no truly distinct personal style in the sense that the people I regard as great modern authors do. Rather, I borrow my style.

Back in high school, and into my earlier years in college, I did a lot of reading, and a lot of writing. Most of the reading I did was fiction, and a lot of that was very well-written. Like I said, stuff like Orwell, Rand, Updike, Pratchett … all these different styles that I absorbed and modeled my own writing after. Every author I read shaped my writing a bit, and I read a LOT. I probably read a major work of fiction a week in those days.

That’s where the other lifestyle change lies, and the other conspirator in the decline of my writing. I’ve replaced my old books with the internet, opting for short saucy news and tech articles over the worthwhile time investment in good fiction. Even the books I pick up these days are all nonfiction stuff … and no matter how well you write about science or information security or psychology or philosophy, it’s still downright boring when compared to the most vapid works of fiction.

That’s where the genius of an Orwell or a Rand or a Wells lies … they’re able to make these great pieces of fiction that revolve around science or philosophy or psychology — that are still intellectually engaging on more than just the candy level of fantasy and romance — but are also manage to be as delicious to consume as those are.

I feel like there’s a huge absence of well-written fiction in my life right now. I try to fill the gap with the narratives of rpgs, with the endless tech articles, with anime, but it’s just not the same. And it’s the other side that’s totally ruining my writing style …

After all, if you’ve got to copy someone, it’s better to copy someone great than some random nooblet on a web forum, right?

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 22nd, 2006 at 10:17 pm and is filed under Idle Musings, observational, window to the soul. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.