Writing

Generally speaking, I do better with list-making than with actual writing. I would much rather make a list of "top 10 things I would change about myself" or "top five strengths" or "action items" (shoot me, please) than actually write a coherent account or argument to communicate the same information.

I'm not sure whether this makes any definitive statement about the nature of my self-reflection, or maybe it's that in my mind the "task" of writing can't be separated from the academic imperative to create a defensible argument. (This may be of a piece with my wife's blog syndrome.) The main problem is that my written communication can't develop through practice, because false imperatives strangle the possibilities of new modes and new fronts. Part of me wishes I had taken creative writing in college, but another part knows it would have been awkward, mostly due to the inevitably forced display of personal inadequacy. We rarely go into situations where we're required to show off what we're not good at.

I wonder too if the nonlinear process I use (to write papers: I "build" them) might itself be partially responsible for my Germanic and analytical tendencies. Sentences are intrinsically one-dimensional; I think three-dimensionally. I compromise by writing two-dimensionally. With enough revision, there's no penalty on fluency, but certainly some magic narrative element is lost. I don't have the gift of surprise anymore.

I don't experience my own texts because I see them the way an architect (or more properly, a contractor) sees a building. Words then primarily form systems, not stories. Thus the criterion or standard is an absence of flaws, not the presence of some human response or impulse. Again, it comes back to a desire to be unassailable, rather than human -- which might be the opposite, anyway.

(As an experiment, I wrote this on a piece of paper in a single sitting in a restaurant, without revision.)