The Grasshopper on Writing
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Cultivating Your Personal Weirdness: Five Writing Lessons
Everyone is not the same, so why are they trying to be?
image copyright 2022 Martin Edic
“We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.”
― Dr. Seuss
I’m having one of those mornings where everything I write and the pieces I have to edit, all seem off. Yesterday was a flow day- a lot of things seemed to naturally find their place.
So, of course, today is going to be the jagged pill, the off day. So, I’m going to write about a critical writing skill no one talks much about. You’re weird and that is an asset.
Don’t tell me you are not weird, I know it. I know it because all of us are weird, even those who work really hard to hide it. But those people are still reading, still wondering, still seeking, just like the rest of us.
They want to meet your weirdness in words, where it is safe to get relatively close. Not close like that guy walking down the street yelling to himself.
Yes, I woke up to one of those today, a real sign from the universe. But he wandered on and I was anonymous to him sitting in my apartment drinking coffee and wondering why the stuff I wrote yesterday seems so crappy today.
I got to experience his weirdness without risk.
Writing personal observations about the world is a tough balancing act. Partially because we live in two worlds. The world of our internal viewpoint and the world we see outside that viewpoint.
Good writers straddle that point and connect the outer with the inner.
Pretty insightful, right? It doesn’t feel like insight to me at the moment, it feels like me trying to reconcile why things are challenging and somehow out of balance.
So, the first writing lesson. Never worry about whether what you are working on is good.
Honestly, you do not know. I have enough people exposed to my work to have a few datapoints and this is what they tell me: I have very little idea what readers will choose to read.
So, why worry about whether your stuff is good. The world will eventually tell you something about that.
Lesson number two. Never ever try to reheat a soufflé. This of course comes from Paul McCartney’s cynical answer when asked for the millionth time if the Beatles would ever get together again.
If you try to duplicate your success or that of others, you will end up with a hot sodden mess, that unfortunate soufflé.
Don’t overthink things.
Lesson number three. Don’t look back. Don’t look forward, either. Both are places that do not actually exist except in your imagination. When you try to reheat a soufflé you are trying to recapture a moment that has passed. When you imagine a future where what you are writing today will somehow be a breakout for you, you are distracting yourself from the work at hand.
You know how woodworkers injure themselves? They use table saws while preoccupied. And fingers end up on the floor coated in sawdust. I’ve seen it happen (we put the fingertip in milk, got him to the ER, and they reattached it).
Btw, the paragraph above is a little weird. Not sure where that came from.
Lesson number four. Stop thinking. Let’s say you have an idea for something you want to explore on a topic, the way I’m working my way towards the power of weirdness. In my example, I suppose I could do some research on the ways writers use weirdness, but I’ve learned that every writer I get something from uses weirdness all the time.
If this weirdness metaphor is getting tired, substitute ‘personality’ for weirdness.
There is writing where the use of personality is unacceptable. I think of instruction manuals for appliances or some kinds of scientific papers where there is a strictly defined style dictated by a respectable journal.
In both cases sublimating weirdness or personality is essential to making sure they accomplish their goal, whether it is keeping you from cutting your finger off or making sure your peers aren’t put off by the writing when the research is the important thing.
I’d like to point out that in both cases there are times when the writer’s weirdness slips in. But it only happens if it gets by the lawyers or the editors.
Final weirdness lesson. Most people can’t write or find it agonizing. But they can tell a story when they’re talking to their friends. That’s because your weirdness is why those friends are even there.
To transfer this to writing for readers you can’t see, remember that your weirdness might be new to them, but if you let it out a bit they will probably be intrigued.
Do you wonder where this piece came from? I was watching YouTube videos about promoting your newsletter. I have a new one and, like all writers, I want readers. So, in my weird morning state of mind, thinking about how bad my writing is, I turned to the mundane.
And boy was it mundane. Build an email list. When you have a few thousand names on it, start offering a premium version.
That was actually an ‘expert’s’ advice, all of it. So, since I am an expert too, I thought I’d try giving some writing advice, but let my weirdness hang out. Just to see how that goes.
Here you go…
“There are people who are generic. They make generic responses and they expect generic answers. They live inside a box and they think people who don't fit into their box are weird. But I'll tell you what, generic people are the weird people. They are like genetically-manipulated plants growing inside a laboratory, like indistinguishable faces, like droids. Like ignorance.”
― C. JoyBell C.
When writing this, I Googled ‘quotes about weirdness’ and got a whole list. Sometimes the internet just delivers!
Thanks for reading.