if i have one writerly ”talent” it's picking up voices. i'm realizing right now, for example, that i dump too much exposition into dialogue because i'm better at dialogue than exposition. but like, i remember not only picking up “house style” at the newspaper i worked at (a dialect some people who weren't from the big-city private-school milieu that made up the newspaper's backbone found alienating), but consciously deciding how i wanted to tweak it to express something slightly different
maybe that's a self-aggrandizing assessment. in any case i've also done a lot of uselessly high-effort pastiche on web forums and so on. minimally i can say i enjoy it.
going back through old posts to migrate them over here, it was really interesting watching me attempt, and fail, to work through how i could express something in ”substack voice.” but i couldn't make it work. i blamed this on sort of general-purpose entropy at the time but i do think it potentially has more to do with the fact of the platform than anything else, a platform i really do find basically antithetical at this point to the effort of thinking things through
[this feels tied into one of the—if not optimistic, exactly—at least generative possibilities emergent from the fact that we live in hell slop gen ai trash world and that it is only going to get worse. which is that as chatgpt house style continues to grey-goo itself all over the already-dessicated public discursive sphere and the baseline voice of english-language writing equilibrates into nauseating sycophantic corporate mediocrity, it will both (a) raise the bar for what constitutes interesting or good writing by elevating and formalizing the mediocre and (b) render good writing more, rather than less, valuable—if not financially, at least spiritually]
i'm hopeful that the combination of blogs i have right now (this one and the more formal ghost blog), as well as the private journaling-type systems i've set up, will facilitate a broader rhetorical range. one more flexible and capable of growing in the ways i'd like to. not merely as a writer, but as a person, as a human being who makes her way through the world, like most of us, trying to stay afloat in the sea of language. i want to be intentional about resisting settling down: being willing to sacrifice something like overall formal cohesion for beat-to-beat expressivity. to write not merely with the intellect but in accordance with the day's spirit: an expression of the mood of a given time and place
writing is an attempt to channel, direct, account for, record, respond to, encapsulate—find a language commensurate with—reality. reality now includes all this fucking bullshit. but there is value in it still. and now, as ever, more than ever, nobody can find it for us but us