Writing Rehab
Hello, my name is Vickie, and I am a recovering writer.
As a recent recipient of an identity-crisis-inducing master’s degree diploma, I suffer from debilitating anxieties surrounding my ability to write. Nay, to think. Somewhere in the National Taiwan Library, there is a dusty corner housing rows of graduate theses, including mine. What a waste of space. Consolidating years of learning into a printed publication should be something of a confidence booster.
Well it ain’t. It’s just given me a complex about writing.
A friend suggested I start a blog but blogging had always seemed self-indulgent to me. What have I got to say that millions of others haven’t already said before?
But I’ve got to start somewhere. So here goes.
“Good English”
For years, I coasted on my “good English.” Growing up in Taiwan as an only daughter to two English teachers, no one ever questioned the correctness of my English. Even though English is technically a second language, I have the privilege of being able to speak English with a fairly convincing American accent, honed over two years as a high school exchange student in the Midwest. Some days it’s hard to convince folks I’m not actually American. I take a teeny bit of pride in that.
English has served me well (except when I used to pronounce Illinois as spelt, or Minnesota as “minion-soda” in my impeccable American accent *cue eye roll*).
So I got by with my “good English,” dismissing my college composition professor’s insistence on “topic sentences” and other archaic rules as old-fashioned and silly. I wanted to freestyle. I could totally make it work.
I went to graduate school for interpreting, training in Simultaneous and Consecutive Interpreting while taking freelance translation work on the side. At this point, English has become my language of choice for both informational input and output.
Naturally, I chose to write my master’s thesis in English. The thesis debacle is topic for another oh-my-so-miserable-but-look-at-this-shiny-diploma post. Suffice to say I suffered much needed blows to my linguistic ego over the six-month writing and revising process.
The Recovery
Towards the last stretch of my thesis, I found a book in my dad’s old collection, titled Writing Clear Paragraphs. He probably bought it when he started teaching freshman English composition. My dad had always highlighted while reading, a habit I share. While flipping through the pages and tracing his steps, it dawned on me how unstructured my writing style was. I wanted to burn (well, delete. We don’t get to be nearly as dramatic in destructive behavior in the digital age) my thesis and start over.
Thus began my quest to gather a toolkit. Here are some resources that I've collected for my recovery (recommendations welcomed!) :
- Elements of Style — Duh.
- Writing Clear Paragraphs — More of a textbook, but very practical nonetheless.
- Everybody Writes by Ann Handley — Elements of Style for marketers, in plainer English. Excellent read.
- Ten Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy
- Brainpickings.org — Curated by Maria Popova, a freelance journalist based in New York. She calls her blog “a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness.” Sounds about right. I also recommend her interview on On Being and The Tim Ferriss Show. (I love my podcasts)
A few common pieces of advice from these gems…
I can't write, yet.
A big part of recovery is convincing yourself that it is possible to recover at all. The books and blogs are lessons and practices, and the message is clear: writing is a learned skill. Call it a muscle, or a technical skill, the point is that it takes work, and you can improve.
That’s good news, people.
It’s not about you.
Clarity comes down to one thing — empathy. Or as Ann Handley calls it, pathological empathy. It’s not about showing off how many fancy words you know or how intricately you can wind a sentence.
Alain de Botton, one of my all-time favorite writers and excellent sentence winder, put it this way in The Romantic Movement.
Academic masochism reflects a metaphysical prejudice that the truth should be a hard-won treasure, that what is read or learnt easily must therefore be flighty and inconsequential. The truth should be like a mount to be scaled, it is dangerous, obscure and demanding. Under the light of the library reading room, the academics’ motto reads: the more a text makes me suffer, the truer it must be.
Don’t make your reader scale mountains. You’re not worthy yet. Craft a message that serves your reader, whether you’re introducing a product or sending a text message about dinner plans.
And finally, the scariest realization of all—
Good writing is really just good thinking.
Also known as my brain is f*******ked. But that’s subject for another day.
So this blog is my self-administered recovery to un-f**k my brain. If you’ve made it this far, Mom, thanks for your unwavering support. I no longer believe in any of your compliments but they’re still nice to hear. Keep ’em coming :)
