Notes

<aside> 💡 Your background as a writer: when did you take Comp I, where? What do you remember about it? Do you write on your own--letters, poetry, fiction, etc?

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<aside> 💡 What aspect of the writing process do you enjoy most/least?

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I probably spend so much time writing because it is something I can entirely alone where I am entirely in control. This needs to be challenged, definitely.

The question of whether or not I actually enjoy writing at all is another one I have probably spent a more-than-appropriate amount of time considering. Having spent so much more time writing outside of professional or academic settings compared to everyone else in my life, I have often been confronted with the observation that [I] must really enjoy doing that usually followed by good-natured but far-too-confident insistence that I must be therefore "passionate" about it.

<aside> 💡 What type of writing do you enjoy most/least?

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https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/272273501711384576

https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/268831105552105472

https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/256284749860044801

The most fun I have ever had writing was a super-productive Winter spent whittling away on a novel project immediately after I’d been forced to concede my fight for Extratone was on the wrong path, if nothing else, and allow myself to consider how to step back and revisit my personal identity, again. I managed to attain a consistent day-to-day writing routine at a level of productivity which dwarfed any state I’d ever been able to maintain before or sense, forging 30,000 words into a “solid,” established start to a novel manuscript.

I've also found writing about film to be relatively satisfying... perhaps only because I am comfortable with my lack of authority in it and have no particular desire to be heard.

<aside> 💡 What are your strengths and weaknesses as a writer?

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https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/734465849520689152

Though I continue to see blog posts and advice pieces surrounding my network of professional writers insisting on volume and regularity as the key to bettering one’s effectiveness as a keyboard-pounding machine, all I’ve noticed in the past few years from myself has been a shrinking vocabulary and a diminishing natural sense of structure. The simplest answer is that I am no longer confident at all in quantifying my own writing abilities. My immediate, instinctive, most visceral reaction to my recent work is a general frustration and confusion with my sudden lack of natural eloquence (read: why aren’t my sentences pretty anymore!?)

I have never been very succinct or written with much brevity, but I have granted myself the freedom of exclusively writing for the primary purpose of entertainment and have never worked under a professional obligation to be functionally informative.[1] This has eventually metamorphosed into a personal disdain for the grammar/style evangelized as the future evolution of English by Medium bloggers and products/services like Grammarly. I believe my rhetoric is best summarized by this passage from *Extratone*’s old Style Guide:

In general, we write, speak, and publish under the assumption of an intelligent, discerning audience, meaning that we are unafraid of traversing obscure, unusual, or extraordinary detail (technical or otherwise,) that we do not patronize beyond the reasonable ability of a modern reader’s search engine, and especially that we format copy independently of common web standard “readability.” Our vocabulary and syntax are diverse (though we do not sacrifice undue time to unearthing bizarre, senseless synonyms,) fluid, and occasionally difficult, but written as such for the purpose of colorful, substantial delivery in acknowledgement of the vast resources instantly available to the modern reader.