Musings of a Semi-Retired Prose Writer

Writing about writing.

In my past life, I was a fervent writer (word vomit kind, not the poetry kind). I resolved to write whatever I couldn’t say, which, as someone who grew up shy, was a lot. In the early years of secondary school I would cut class to sit in a toilet cubicle and storyboard in the Notes app on my phone. A graded essay where I challenged myself to make as many Touhou song references as possible was shortlisted for my school’s student anthology. Putting pen to paper came naturally for as long as I could remember, and the only limits were the boundaries of my imagination.

Oh, how those times have changed with age. Now I find myself grimacing at the idea of having to take “essay mods” next semester. Once I lied about not being too good at writing because I just didn’t want to bear the responsibility of proofreading a group project report. Thankfully, some traces remain — it’s not too difficult to write for the purposes of everyday communication, and on some occasions, I even get inspiration on my morning commute to write a mediocre tweet and post it instead of leaving it in the drafts.

To close out that chapter of my youth that was built mostly around being a reserved person who found solace in the written word, I’ve written below how my feelings towards it have evolved over these years.

Writing is better left as a hobby than a job

I did see myself making a career out of journalism at one point, and while I still think my skepticism and strong raging desire for hard facts would make me a decent one, it seems that the industry is structured such that if you want to find conventional success, you have to compromise on some of those values that make a good journalist because from what I see, there are like, three likely paths:

1. Sign a five-year bond for a scholarship with the local mainstream media giant to cover stories about local otter sightings.
2. Sell your soul to write M*thership/food blog fluff pieces about how Fairprice is having a discount on canola oil. Only one sentence per paragraph, because people don’t have the attention span to read more than that.
3. Become woke. Shill your Substack newsletter because being an independent correspondent, you’re also broke. Maybe go to jail for libel.

I have utmost respect for the people in this industry. Even if they have to swallow their ethics and tell a truth through the lens of their company’s vested interests, or even if they have to write sensationalist crap just to remain employed. The thought of having to write like that completely strips away any of the fun I get from writing; I’d rather not pursue this path if it means that something I like doing turns into something I hate.

(On a broader note, this seems like a pretty common theme among people looking to monetise their hobbies — at some point, it stops being about what they like doing but rather, what brings in the most business. I suppose everyone has to decide for themselves if that’s a trade-off worth making.)

That being said, the Fourth Estate in its traditional newsroom-like representation is diminishing in power, and it’s becoming easier for common folk like you and me with interests in other topics to command the principles of good journalism and find a voice in the modern mediascape. Whether that leads me back to doing some form of quasi-journalism in the future… who knows.

Flowery <> Better

I once was asked to provide a writer bio for a publication that I produced work for, and I sent this in:

“Brevity is the soul of wit, that’s why I am so full of shit.”

Still proud of that one till this day. I used to not be very good at being concise. You can still see traces of this in all of my posts where I sometimes use big words just because I know they exist.

But if you’re trying to write something marketable, the last thing you want is to confuse your audience with bombastic words. This sort of ties in with the above bit on writing for a living — one has to change her style if she cares more about writing for an audience than for pleasure, and I had to learn that eventually. Of course these things are not mutually exclusive, and I’m using this blog to find my happy medium. (Medium, haha, get it?)

Reading shouldn’t be a personality trait

“When you can’t write, read. When you can’t read, write.” To me, writing will always be like emptying the tank of ideas that you’ve accumulated. These ideas come from experiences, and the most efficient (but not necessarily the best) way to gain experience is to synthesise others’ experiences communicated through their writings. To accompany my writing habit I naturally read a lot as well. These days, I’m proud of myself if I manage to finish a whopping one book a month. I used to feel some shame over that habit dying, but not anymore.

My shame originated from the flawed notion that somehow, being an avid reader is a sign of moral superiority. What do I mean? You probably know someone who self-identifies as a bookworm. How do they exhibit this trait? Maybe they are purists who think the act of reading is less valid if you’re reading a through a certain medium (e.g. paperback vs e-book, magazines vs novels). Or maybe they low-key measure their worth by the number of books they can finish within a certain duration, regardless of whether they actually absorb anything they read or not. I used to flirt with these ideas, but eventually realised: what the hell does this prove? What’s the point of bragging that you can tear through novels but don’t synthesise a thing? Does that not defeat the entire purpose of reading books — entertainment, knowledge, escape and so on? Having come to the conclusion that quality > quantity, I am now fully at peace with my reading speed and no longer see it as something I need to prove my worth at.

Everything is narrative

I have a few friends in medicine school, a course notorious for difficult admissions criteria. Some of them remarked that when asked why they wanted to study medicine, a big chunk of their cohort had a similar answer: “When I was young I got sick and had to go to the hospital and the doctors nursed me back to health and I got super inspired by them so I made it my life’s mission to become a doctor blah blah”. It’s so competitive that just being honest and saying that you like money/helping others/slicing people open doesn’t cut it anymore. To be remembered you need a catchy origin story for yourself.

And if you tell a story enough times, you might start to believe it as a truth. Wherever we go, we’re carrying a narrative about ourselves, others and the world that reflects in our behaviour. As I grow older I become more conscious of how the words I put down reflect my ideology even in “objective” pieces and how it might be construed by others, and whether I can even communicate that narrative reliably. But I’m probably overthinking it, because I’m pretty sure no one cares enough to be psychoanalysing me based on my verb usage.

It doesn’t just apply to people, though. When trying to explain a concept, hard facts seldom go into peoples’ heads. That’s why communication coaches always drill down on the power of anecdotal evidence. Twentieth-century comms scholar Walter Fisher coined the Narrative Paradigm, which claims that meaningful communication is understood & relayed through storytelling or reporting. People like tropes — just think of the Hero’s Journey, wild conspiracy theories, a small action making a big difference in the world. We (and news media) like to ascribe narratives to potentially random occurrences (“he must have ignored me because he thinks I’m weird”, “the stock market is down today because of inflation fears”) because having a reason for the situation makes us feel better about it — which is nice, until we end up making bad decisions based on those false assumptions.

I wonder if it’s because being able to justify one’s circumstances gives him the feeling of taking back some of his explanatory power in a confusing world, granting a sense of safety or even superiority? This is interesting and could be a standalone post, so let’s probe into that another day.

Moving On

Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy writing and the self-elucidation it provides feels pretty much like going to therapy for free. These extreme views on something seemingly trivial are proof of how close I hold this activity to my heart still, even if I’m a lot more deliberate (or lazy?) with what I choose to articulate or immortalise in ink nowadays. Certainly, I’ll be nostalgic for those days where I could bash out 3000+ words of fiction in one sitting, but I also know it’s time to move on to the many other cool things that are out there. And as I move towards those, I’ll come back to write about them, in a way that espouses the principles of good writing that I impose on myself.