writing

[aryanhwy]

hrj confessed recently to enjoying reading her own writing, a confession I found very interesting, if not a little marvelous, because my own feelings towards my academic writing is highly ambivalent. I enjoying finishing things up, and sending them to my standard set of beta-readers (Joel; my mom; anyone who was involved in the production of the paper via FB conversations), and I am strongly enough invested in what I've said that I will righteously dispute every single comma Joel wants me to remove, because clearly it is the RIGHT comma, otherwise I wouldn't have put it in there in the first place! Then I send it off, to a conference, to a journal, and then at some unspecified time in the future, I get the reports back, and, positive or negative, I have such a hard time reading them, and an even harder time addressing them (even when the report is positive and I know publication is on the horizon!) -- and it is partly because dealing with other people's comments is tedious and annoying, but partly because I've finished that project, I've closed it off and moved on, and I don't really enjoy revisiting what I've written. It's not that in retrospect, I think it is poorly written, or that I should've done it differently, or anything like that, but mostly that I've finished that thing and am doing something else now, and what's the point of rereading, I already know what the paper says, I was the one who said it in the first place!

But I think I do understand, a bit, of what she means, because I get glimpses of it when I am rereading my fiction. There are a few pieces from my late teens/early 20s that I reread and think "Wow, yeah, that was pretty good", but I always dismiss this feeling, discount my own enjoyment, because who am I to judge? Maybe I only think it is good because I remember the context in which it was written, and that colors my view of it; if viewed objectively by someone who didn't know what it was intended to say, maybe it would fall short.

It's different, though, with my current writing project, my 400 words. I made a promise to myself that these would be written for me and only for me, that I would write what I enjoy. I've fallen enough out of the habit that when I do sit down to write, I often have to review some of the recent days to remember exactly what I said -- especially as repeating certain phrases is a trope I'm using to tie things together. And more and more, I find that when I do so, I get sucked in to what I've written, it draws me into a vortex I can't quite escape, and when I finally do surface for air, part of me thinks "Whoa. That was actually really good." And this time, I'm able to listen to that voice, and not discount it, because I'm the only one I'm writing for. If it draws me in and makes me feel the way I do, then it is successful, and I can enjoy its success. I don't have to worry about whether it is comprehensible to anyone else -- even knowing that other people are reading it -- because I am not writing it for them. I am writing it for me. If they enjoy it, if they can reconstruct their own version of the story from it, hey, that's great! I'm glad! But that is incidental to what I am doing and why: Which means that I don't have to feel like it is overweening pride, to reread these words and find them well-written, because they are well-written in the sense that they do exactly what they are supposed to do: They tell a story that I want to read and to be a part of. Whoever else reads this, I don't give a fig for their opinion (though, of course, if they DO enjoy it, that's a perk.)

So, yeah, I think I finally get it. And maybe this is why I don't feel this way about my academic writing: Because the writing is almost exclusively for other people, and not for myself. It is almost exclusively about production, for production. It is the creation of a product, and I enjoy the creation and I enjoy doing a good job, but I am not invested in the product at all, because the product is for others, and not for me. Whereas this is solely for me, and so it is not prideful for me to say "This does what it was intended to do well."

Comments

[lumineaux.livejournal.com]

I enjoy reading my own work writing once I have sufficient distance from it. Going back to a brief or article I wrote two years or more ago, I can appreciate it objectively and decide whether it is persuasive or not. Sometimes I do read something I wrote long enough ago that I can say, "wow, that argument really didn't work, did it?" I find that useful because it influences my ongoing style -- if something didn't work for me, I try not to use it again in a similar context.