The hardest part of writing has little to do with words. Words are cheap, plentiful. They’re also easily replaced and moved. They’re neither overly sensitive nor especially heavy. Don’t like how a sentence sounds? Swap one word for a different one. Still not loving it? Fuck with the structure. Not sure whether a phrase is clear? Add a word or remove one. That work? No? Keep cycling through synonyms and phrasings until you find the right fit and the good sound. If writing were just a matter of getting words down and having them work a certain type of way when strung together, then writing would be easy and simple and pleasant. It isn’t and it’s not. At least not for us.
For us, the hardest part of writing has to do with what happens both before and after words enter the picture.
Before you (and by you we mean we) need to worry about words, you need to worry about whether a feeling or thought or story or whatever is worth expressing in words. In other words, you need to ask yourself if you have something that merits sharing. This isn’t unlike what happens with speech.
Save that speech usually transpires in functional or friendly settings. You speak in order to (hopefully) accomplish something - buy a pack of cigarettes, say - or relate somehow to a person who (presumably) cares to relate to you. In both of these scenarios, the person to whom you’re speaking occupies a roughly known position which, then, helps you sort out whether to express something, what to express, and how best to express it. Our speech acts are, more often than not, guided by the person to whom we are speaking rather than any kind of spontaneous, self-authored desire. Left to our own devices, we don’t speak at all.
Writing - especially the kind of writing we get up to here - doesn’t transpire in a functional or friendly setting. You (whoever you are) don’t occupy a known position to us. Even the very few of you who know us IRL aren’t knowable as readers. While these things that we write are (still, often) attempts to both accomplish something and relate somehow, they’re directed towards unknown and unknowable recipients. We can’t, then, take our cue about whether, what, or how to express something by sorting through who you are to us, what you might expect or want, and how you might receive these words. But just because we can’t take our cue from you doesn’t mean we don’t try to.
The first hard part of writing, then, is imagining what “you” might think or feel or do as a result of us expressing and sharing something. This is entirely and totally speculative. “You” truthfully might not think or feel or do anything at all. “You” might merely delete this email on sight or open it only to annul the inbox notification. Even if this is likely the truth, we can’t allow ourselves to imagine things that way.
The prospect that “you” will neither think, feel, nor do anything with what we express kills the possibility of writing. So, we need to pretend that some imaginary you might think or feel or do something. This, then, means we need to work through whether our writing might make you think or feel or do worthwhile or pleasant things. Will you be annoyed that we’re discussing something you’ve already heard before or considered elsewhere ad nauseum? Will you laugh or cringe at the topic or subject of the piece? Will you be bemused or confused by some story? Will you be sympathetic to or put-off by attempts at sincerity? Will you feel comforted or alienated by irony? Will you be moved to question something or think something through along novel or different lines? Will you decide that our writing isn’t worth the effort, that we’re not worth reading, halfway through the post? Will you like or approve of what we share with you and think about it in turn, share it with others, respond somehow to it?
We will never know the answers to these questions and, in truth, the answers don’t and can’t really matter - but, all the same, we obsess over all this long before we sit down to write a single pretty word.
How, you might wonder, do we resolve these unanswerable questions based on imagining some version of “you” receiving our writing in a certain sort of way? We don’t. Or at least not really. We think through a litany of possibilities and so long as that litany is incorrigibly plural, we decide to write. So long as there’s a cacophony of potential responses - positive, negative, and neutral - we figure it’s probably worth expressing and sharing some feeling or thought or story or whatever. If there’s seeming harmony amongst the (remember, totally imaginary) possible responses (e.g. everyone will probably wholeheartedly agree with us, assent totally, feel warmly good without issue), then we abandon the thing we had initially considered expressing. This (at least in our head) protects us from putting out anything altogether trite or harmful or wholly self-serving. It’s a flawed procedure, but it’s all we’ve got.
Having undergone the agony of imagining unimaginable people feeling and thinking unknowable feelings and thoughts, we then sit and write. We do words for a while. It’s easy. We know, like, over a hundred words. We don’t worry so much about whether we’ve got the right ones as we put them down. We don’t stress over their order. We just let them happen until they stop happening. We might pause here and there to think about whether this word or this phrase matches up with the nebulous idea or whatever is floating anxiously around in our head, but those pauses tend to be brief. Like we said, words are the easiest part of writing.
Once all the words are there, then we get to go through the second hardest part of writing. It’s more or less exactly like the first part. Here, though, we’re no longer imagining “you” but rather reflecting on “us.”
Did we succeed in making the funny stuff funny, the thoughtful stuff thoughtful, and so on? Did we tell the truth? Did we share too much? Were we clear? Were we likable? Were we relatable? Did we do the idea justice? Does what we’re expressing reflect well or poorly on us? Does it properly capture the topic or subject or whatever? Are we willing to take responsibility for whatever mistakes or errors we may have made in this writing? Will we feel unduly troubled if we lose subscribers over this? Or, worse, will we be made anxious by gaining subscribers over this? Do we want to share this and be vulnerable to whatever responses might come? Do we want to share this and be vulnerable to the absence of any responses? Are we doing this just for clout? For likes? To prop up or sate the misguided sense that self-worth is determined by others? Are we satisfied or content or disappointed or dismayed by the effort and thought that we’ve put into this? Would we still feel that way if it were received by no one and effected nothing? Is thinking and expressing thoughts just always fundamentally fucking embarassing? And if so, is it worth doing anyways?
As with the before part of writing, the after part likewise doesn’t get resolved in any real way. So long as there are a decent variety of possible answers (with a couple of exceptions), then we edit our words and phrases over the course of a couple of hours and take the (very admittedly minimal) risk of posting the thing.
Then we usually go for a very long walk where we switch our phone over to airplane mode and try to pretend that none of the proceeding everything even happened and that we aren’t even a person capable of thought or expression at all.
We’d like to believe that the pathological imaginary exercises that we go through before and after writing aren’t exclusive to writing, but we legit don’t have anything else to really compare it to. Believe it or not, all the non-writing aspects of our experience are shockingly easeful.
But - come to think of it - a version of this mental and emotional wrestling match with pretend others and versions of yourself is maybe exactly what goes on whenever we (or maybe anyone?) decides to venture to express or share something with others. We’ve been led to believe that what we express and share is valuable only insofar as others deem it appropriate, valuable, or anything else. Likewise, we’ve been lured to accept that who we are is a mere byproduct of what we offer to others through actions, expressions, and the like. We can see these split attitudes - between imagining the perceptions of others and imagining oneself as a result of those perceptions - in the very old, but very apt “felt cute but might delete later.” It might be an old meme, but there is something true or at least something that feels truthful. (More upsetting than an old meme being representative of an undercurrent of feeling is the idea that an undercurrent of feeling can be captured so perfectly by a quick phrase effortless cast off.)
Would that we could share without being cute and cut out the idea that deleting anything is a solution or salve.
Expressing oneself is a nightmare of continually and perpetually getting over and confronting yourself in various guises. It’s an act of self-annihilation and narcissism at once. It’s great and absolutely gross. We wish and hope that if we keep doing it for long enough the good stuff will, miraculously, escape from or efface all the gross stuff - but we have a sneaking suspicion that that’s not likely or even possible.
And why are we sharing all this with you? That really is the question, right? Not just why share with you at all, but why share this with you? There are a lot of possible answers. Not all of them are good or pleasant. And how do we feel about that? There are a lot of possible answers. Most of them aren’t good or pleasant.
It would be nice, here, to say that we’re doing this for you (maybe you’ll relate or sympathize or appreciate some part of all this) and/or for us (maybe there’s some emotional or intellectual benefit to some part of all this) - but there are good odds that neither’s the case. Many of “you” will have stopped reading this a while ago and we - having been alive for a while - know that the emotional and intellectual benefits of expressing oneself are typically short-lived and often spurious.
Having, now, written ourselves into something of a corner and feeling not a little exposed, we’re going to hide behind a quote from William Gass that we think of often before and after writing.
“I know of nothing more difficult than knowing who you are, and having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world.”
Yesterday we balked at the difficulty and lacked courage. Today’s different, it seems we are a touch less lazy and a temporarily less cowardly. But what do you think? Did we do OK? Did you enjoy this? Do you like us? Do we like us? Was it clear? Does it matter? Was this worth it? All this effort - for this? For us? For you? All that for this? Jeez.
P.S. This will be the last time we write about writing. We know it’s despicable, but - sadly - it felt necessary or something like that.
P.P.S. As compensation or penance for having deviated from our promise schedule of posting every other day (and especially for writing about writing/self-expression/whatever today), here’s a playlist that works at capturing our peculiar ambivalence towards this thing absolutely no one has asked us to do. Enjoy! Or don’t! Whatever! It would be damaging to keep concerning ourselves with you at this point! And ourselves! Enough! It’s been a long fifty something hours. Here’s music:
"It’s an act of self-annihilation and narcissism at once. It’s great and absolutely gross. "
Sounds like all of the art making I've ever done too. And maybe also all of the living.