writing in simple languages
while reading complex & beautiful things
I know I’m supposed to write about the things I’ve been reading, and the hiatus in this place was certainly not due to lack of good books and articles, but on the contrary, an opulence, an overwhelming amount, of beautiful words and thoughts conjured by other people, that beset my desire to make an attempt myself.
It’s a mental habit I’m trying to get rid of - the tendency to not want to write in fear of judgment (although I’m my own harshest critic). It’s actually pretty simple: I am to read books and things that I like, and then write about what I read. It’s not a multiple choice question or a test where anybody expects me to nail it with the right answer. Of course it’s funny to think about it, because would a homemaker feel insecure of her own running pace after watching athletes break their world records? Probably not. But what withdrew me from consistently writing were 1) necessity and 2) beauty, or more precisely, the lack thereof. I wasn’t fully convinced that my writings could serve a functional purpose or an aesthetic one for that matter.
I’m not completely devastated by my pessimistic attitude towards writing, because I think it is healthy to have a bit of disdain towards one own’s private thoughts taking space and form via letters and syntaxes. I doubt I’ll ever fall in love with my own writings (does anybody ever?), so instead of trying to like what I write, this is what I am going to do: use simple and plain languages. I think anybody can do that. To write simply. Should be easy. Or I could be wrong. But going forward this is what I am resolved to do, to write so plainly that it’s borderline boring1.
Coming to understand that writing simply is actually more challenging than one can imagine because:
it takes a bit of work on the ego: to face the fact that using complex words doesn’t equal to having deep thoughts
one needs to consciously fend off fluffy words, corporate speak, decorative inserts, and fancy Latin phrases: this one is especially hard for someone in a corporate world like me where these are glorified and held up as a signal for “educated” when it’s actually not really. And like it or not, you start picking up after the manner of people you spend most time with // in a nut shell: don’t use empty words
These are simple terms but hard to accomplish especially when it feels like there are no good ideas or topics to write on. If my goal here were to write big scary beautiful stuff, I am setting myself up for failure, so here I am once again trying to pick myself up by setting the bar low - the goal is to keep writing. It’s unfortunate how I made this a safe playground for myself to write whatever I want, yet turned it into a literary drudgery. So I’m going to deceive and tell myself the goal is to write boring stuff. Don’t wait for inspiration. Bore readers out so they can’t get to the bottom of it. How this thought makes me want to go on and on2.
I am not here to condemn myself as a defense mechanism before anybody can. This is not a manifesto to write trash or just about anything that comes to my mind. In fact, I am here to write well, but first of all, to write. And I realized the solution to both of these was to try write simply — not to intentionally bore readers, but even if I did (although unwanted for sure), that I would be okay with it. That I’ll just try to do better next time. To have a next time.
I recently read a book by Italo Calvino, and one of its chapters called Lightness had this quote I really liked. It shifted something in me:
My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language… I have come to consider lightness a value rather than a defect.
And speaking of lightness, I hope this memo serves as GLP-1 to my current mental and literary state of obesity3.
As always, here is a list of things I have recently read that were good:
This substack piece on passion and perseverance by the one and only HH
…and other cultural commentaries about Ozempic and the obesity pandemic
not that I have to try really hard ha…ha…
you are watching self manipulation in action (reverse psychology is highly effective)
A reference to what I’ve been quite obsessed these past few weeks, Novo Nordisk and Ozempic. Have been stuffing myself with articles and videos about it, what it means physically and culturally for not just the obese population, but also for the general consumers. Anyways, I apologize for the crappy exit, am working on it.