what writing is like

for an April

Once upon a time, I used to find writing anything at all utterly excruciating. I had to write a bunch of papers for a unimester Humanities class that I had to take my first year of college, and this was an immensely stressful experience. I put them off until the day they were due, and even then was barely able to force the paragraphs out one-by-one.

Or, well, I say

anything at all

but that can’t be quite right. There was certainly the occasional thing I had fun with. And I would be shocked if you peeked at the April from half a decade ago and found her to never engage in the production of long multiparagraph Discord messages or whatnot. And sometimes I managed to pick a high school essay topic that I actually had something to say about and then it usually went a lot easier.

The issue was never with like, piecing individual sentences together correctly. I have the rules of grammar baked into my skull well enough that I can look at any unusual conjugation or punctuation mark and have very little confusion about what’s going on with it. Sure, I write the odd typo from time to time, but most of these blog posts were pretty much just written in one draft, and I don’t think they’re that bad¹¹ Probably they have, like, a bunch of comma splices in places where I would defend the choice to do a comma splice. (Though it might also have some I wouldn’t be quite so inclined to defend).! I don’t know if it’s just my education or just talent, but I know generally smart people who struggle with this particular skill, so I try not to take it for granted. It might be related to the traits that make me good at math and programming²² Not to overstate my programming skill. I lack a lot of skills necessary for doing full-scale software engineering or anything like that. But, you know, I can mostly look at a line of code and understand what it does, maybe after consulting documentation..

The issue was all in like, what do I even write. Maybe I have a vague idea of a post topic—how do you ever get from that to a post?

Part of my problem was perhaps summed up by Sasha Chapin a few years back:

Sasha's 'Newsletter'

If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying

Perhaps you’ve complained before that you don’t have anything to write about. That your “mind has gone blank,” that you don’t have any ideas…

Read more

4 years ago · 366 likes · 25 comments · Sasha Chapin

But I’m not certain if that’s the whole thing. Like, I definitely needed to get myself to lean more towards babble and less towards prune to ever be able to get any sort of Apriiori post out, but—it’s just, kind of shocking how large the difference is between “help I am procrastinating my college essays and can barely write them even once I sit down to do so” to “yeah I put out a blog post daily for an entire month”.

Like, realistically, some of the difference is possibly stimulants? One of the earliest posts on this blog was just, a result of me taking caffeine after a break:

WHY DOES IT FORMAT LIKE THAT. I will be back at a place with a computer where I can use normal hyperlinks tomorrow I promise. Unless I miss my train I guess.

—and many of the posts this November were a similar story. Probably there’s a correlation between post length and stimulant usage. But like, for a supermajority of the days in the back half of the month I didn’t have any coffee or anything, it’s not just that I didn’t develop my college coffee addiction until my second year of college (I think) or get an adderall prescription until near the end of my third.

Maybe I just like, have a better feel for what sorts of topics have the sort of spark that I can write about them. Maybe it’s just that I tend to not have spectacularly many goals beyond “get words on the page”, whereas in college I tended to have some sort of highly nebulous standard I was aiming towards. Because really, at this point, writing a blog post often doesn’t feel spectacularly different from just like, having a conversation. I just say things. I assume there is some level of writing skill where you graduate beyond just saying stuff, but those skills aren’t quite the primary ones that a “blog post daily in November” challenge is aiming at.

I hope you have enjoyed Apriiori’s heightened level of activity through the month of November. I probably won’t stop, but I’m sure not aiming for daily³³ I also might spend more time writing glowfic.. Maybe some of the posts will even be polished! (No promises). I’ll probably write some more general reflections on how the project went tomorrow, but I wanted to do a topic that was slightly less than pure meta while the challenge was still actually going on :p