This is Where I am Today

If I am to be completely honest with myself, I’ve never been very good at writing. I have that annoying habit one seems to inevitably acquire if one is in by any peculiarity British, with sentences that possess three too many clauses and a passive voice that has all the narrative drive of still life of Worcester. Really, whenever I read anything I’ve written I feel as though I’m swimming in molasses, unable to extricate myself. I’m not sure how to rectify this problem. It seems innate, like all those nervous impulses to shout out dumb things in the midst of grave or important events.

            I also developed an unfortunate disability where I absorb the topic and style of the thing that I have most recently read, and spills over into my own shabby prose with disastrous results. I am the type of stylist you might see in a back issue of Rolling Stone, imitation and purple prose coloring the story that is being read with an unfavorable hue (mixed metaphor and bad pun intended and presented as the primary example). I cannot honestly look at what I’ve written, and say that I enjoy reading it alone and in silence.

            However, it is better than the alternative, for my writing, when read aloud, makes my skin crawl. Especially if I am the one doing it. I falter on all the wrong words, read in a bleak monotone that renders the whole of it rather unpleasant, like slightly rotting meat. There’s always something slightly off in the prose and it was made worse by this, so that the listener will soon be clutching at their throat and scanning for the nearest exit.

            I attribute this mostly to my writing process, which uses one of two methods, neither of which are particularly flowing. The first is an odd stream of consciousness, what I utilize when a story is first forming and in danger of being lost. Here my writing is lightening, instantaneous bursts of prose that hit quickly and are gone. When the reverie is over, and I go back to survey the damage I am always dismayed. I have words, awkward phrasings, and peculiarly juvenile dialogue and progression. The story, or essay flops around in no order except one designed by a madman or a fool. And the vocabulary. It’s so limited, it makes me want to wretch, as though I’ve barely progressed from fifth grade when all my writing was scribbled on yellow legal pad.  The other way I write, is with slow deliberation, that always creates the kind of tortured manifestations most writers managed only when they were twelve and still drew pictures in the margins of their T. H. White impressions.

I despair when I look at my writing, and when I begin to pick it apart I wonder if I might not be better served going into medical school, for although it considerably more work, there’s the benefit that people expect to be unable to read what you have written.