On Writing

January 17, 2020

Editorial Note: this post isn’t about research or teaching. It’s sort of about writing. It’s also a ‘breaking the ice’ post to re-open the blog by posting editing some recent writings into something like a blog post.

I have been writing a lot. Since it’s mostly for work, it’s mostly ‘technical’ writing. As these things go, this has led to me spending a lot of time thinking about writing. If you’ve made the dubious choice of following me on twitter, you might have noticed the slew of posts in which I have been haphazardly posting musings on Words et al.

Writing is weird. I have a todo list based on an interminable number of drafts that are sitting on a laptop in which a hard drive full of bits is waiting, screaming even, to be configured to store characters that combine to make words that string together to make sentences that, if I’m really lucky and the magic dust settles in the right way, weave together to create ‘meaning’ (whatever that might be) so that someone else may have a look and, for a moment, though distant through time and space, share a thought with me.

My laptops hard drive is, of course, not actually screaming for these encodings. It doesn’t care. But I’m not very good at deadlines, so sometimes it’s useful to try and manufacture all manner of external pressure.

If my old high school English class is anything to go by, that’s called personification - when you give human qualities to a non-human entity. Or something like that - my high school English class is probably not a reputable source to go by. We were pretty sure our teacher didn’t read our papers, so one time a friend of mine wrote a bunch of swear words into her paper to see if the teacher would notice. She got an A and a smiley face on the front page. Somehow, though perhaps not surprisingly, that old building between a cemetery and an abandoned damn, nestled in a town, in a place where it’s illegal to write English words too big in case the French words nearby get jealous, wasn’t exactly a bastion for literary development. I think they’ve closed down the section of the school that housed the English classes now. But I digress. We don’t get to do much personification in scientific writing. Which is a shame, because this draft I’m working on is a real stubborn old bastard.

I’m writing this on my phone. Partly because I am currently avoiding that screaming laptop that is not yet full enough of words. And also partly because, somewhat ironically, my head is sometimes just so full of words that some of them start tumbling out wherever I am and I so either catch them in the nearest electronic bucket and dutifully file them away to a folder called ‘Drafts’, never to be seen again, or I just let them flutter away as ghosts, whispering in the wind. I end up writing quite a lot of things on my phone. I wrote my favorite blog post on my phone, wandering the hills around San Francisco.

It is, of course, ironic to find myself procrastinating writing by… writing. By writing the wrong words. Not that these words are wrong, per se, but they are not the ones I need. I have considered re-purposing them and just dropping them into a Discussion section somewhere, but I think the neighboring Results section, so dutifully crafted to report exactitudes and remove all ambiguity and interest, might be disgruntled at having such an unruly neighbor. Nerd.

At least wandering around San Francisco I knew what I was writing about. This post, I am less sure what it is about. I think perhaps it is an undirected reaction to the act of crafting such specific words on such specific topics for specific people - words so dutifully concocted so that those people may, in a moment of ignoring their own screaming drafts, at least glance at them sometime and nod along with a vague sense of recognition.

And to be clear, I do like writing specific words about specific things. At least sometimes. But also, in my head lie multitudes of unspecified thoughtlets - hints of ideas that may one day become thoughts, become words, become written or become spoken - or may not. Thoughtlets, that do not say anything specific. Thoughtlets that manage to embody the concepts half-heartedly offered by an English class that I didn’t even know I was listening to about how sometimes a pen is a dull and laborious implement, dragged half-heartedly around the outline of a story pre-written; but how sometimes it can be an unwieldy and giddy guide, dragging unwitting fingers around to sketch out the shapes of stories they didn’t even know they knew.

So if you’ve read these words - written non-specifically for no one in particular - thank you for entertaining my meandering thoughtlets. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s a grumpy old bastard I need to attend to.

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Addendum: The short musings that keep littering my Twitter are undoubtedly influenced by reading the book Several Short Sentences About Writing, which I very much recommend. Also, if you are curious, these random musing about writing do not good tweets make (by any available metrics of engagement). I still enjoy them though.