A bit of my old persona, the Angry Young Man, has seeped back into my consciousness. This time, it’s about my writing.
You see, I’ve reduced the volume of personal writing that I publish here. Byand large, it is due to the fact that I’ve come to hate just how self-absorbed and self-indulgent personal pieces can be. While there is no better place for that than on a personal blog, I do not wish to pollute my body of work with worthless little pieces of deep-sounding personal insights. While they may be quite insightful and revelational to my personal growth, it isn’t something I wish to expose to the public. It’s not so much that I am being guarded. Rather, it’s about pushing myself to become a better writer.
It’s far too easy to write purple prose about the personal little trials and tribulations of my life, the little tortures of the soul that I endure on a daily basis. It’s far too easy to indulge in fanciful language that express the empty echoes of the hollow existence of loneliness that reverberate from the farce of a life that I presume to live. That sort of personal writing is entirely simplistic and serve only to exhibit my ability to string together little bits of poetic-sounding words to form an emotionally laden sentence. That sort of writing is best left to poetry, not prose.Instead of stagnating in my writing, instead of expressing my innermost emotions in emotionally laden pieces of prose, my desire is to grow as a writer. My latest writing exercise was a relative success. I could’ve simply wrote a little journal entry and posed my thoughts in a straightforward way. Instead, Reflections on a hot day became an exercise in the use of repetitive literary devices as well as a small exercise in the use of structure. I decided in the middle of writing it to use “not really” as a repeated device. I also decided at the end to bring in some parts of the beginning: Geronimo and the livery driver served as little structural elements. The tone and style was also something new to me.In short, that piece was a refreshing change of pace for me. All of it was done on the fly, without any sort of careful calculation. Rather, there was a sort of playfulness in writing it. Winging it was fun, and it pushed me to develop something from nothing. Not only was it an exposition of some my thoughts, it was more importantly something new I hadn’t tried before.
Gone are the days where I’ll bitch and moan about darkness, loneliness, and all that other nonsense. Well, that’s a lie. I’ll probably still do that. But at least it’ll be more fun to read (or at least more fun to write).
