Hello World

I loved reading. But I hated writing when I was a kid. I would procrastinate, dread it, wait until the last night or the morning before an assignment was due, and slam it out when the stress of the deadline was finally enough to overcome my resistance.

Once I got to college, I tried to avoid writing entirely. The only class I ever took with essays was an improv class, in the Drama department, where the instructor swore that he would be the easiest grader that we had ever seen, he really didn’t care about quality, he wouldn’t criticize our papers, he was just forced to do some sort of formal evaluation.

And yet he did criticize my papers, I remember clearly. Conversely. “Stop using a thesaurus! I feel bad that you’re putting so much work into this. Just write something.” He didn’t believe me when I said that I just used these words, just like he didn’t believe me when I said I didn’t know what a Cockney accent was. (He also criticized my acting ability. Said that I was only able to portray one character, the sarcastic critic type. That criticism seemed fair.)

So it’s not that I enjoy writing. It’s more that I read so much. I like reading. All sorts of things. Books, blog posts, substacks, Twitter, Google Reader back in the day. Maybe that’s what makes writing painful. I reread what I wrote, and compared to the great authors, every sentence clunks. My own writing is like heavy pieces of scrap metal dropped into place, to make a bridge across a stream. I wish it was some elegant elven arch, but it just isn’t. I can work and work to move it 1% in that direction. Smooth off the roughest edges.

But here I am, writing. Why?

Sometimes, especially right when I wake up in the morning, I have this feeling like a leftover from a dream. There is some thought that is on the tip of my tongue, almost expressed, and I try to actually think that thought, but it’s actually not just one thing, it’s even more complex and interesting than I realized at first. And I wish I could read a really excellent essay on the topic. I wish I could have all of the parts of this important thought neatly laid out in my mind, the way you do after you read an excellent introduction.

But no, no such essay exists. There rarely is an essay about some interesting point made halfway through a novel, or how an AI thing that just came out yesterday might affect some totally unrelated field.

The best I can do is write about it myself. So here I am.