The Grasshopper Sunday Edition May, 28, 2023: The Rise of Gobbledygook
There is such a thing as taking yourself too damn seriously
This morning I read this:
“I have discovered a thread, a singular flow of subtlety throughout my life. I realized I had been weaving pieces of experience that perfectly connected into a beautiful tapestry allowing me to discover meaning or at least a path merging my experiences, letting me view them as moments of stillness that allowed deep insight.”
This was on a blog which popped up in my Flipboard feed under the umbrella topic of mindfulness. That category showed up in my feed after an update of the app- not my choice. I’m not going to reference the specific blog because I’m using it as an example of something I’m seeing a lot lately: writing that takes itself way too seriously.
There is something called World Meditation Day and it is flooding my feed with pseudo mystical baloney as writers jump on the bandwagon and try to grab a little attention.
I also get a daily email quote from Tricycle Magazine, a legitimate online and print magazine devoted to serious Buddhist thought and practice. I don’t know who chooses these quotes but most range from meaningless to ridiculous. And I’ve noticed a pattern that will probably raise some hackles.
The quotes that are most practical and those that ring of truth are coming from serious Asian and Tibetan practitioners, and the lousy stuff typically comes from Western practitioners who have appropriated Zen and Tibetan titles to add to their western names.
I’ve never understood this choice, but unless you are a full time monk or recognized reincarnation, these titles should not be used. Our own names are just fine.
What does this have to do with writing you might ask. It has to do with original thought and the ability to self-edit when your writing doesn’t ring as true experience.
Now I accept that the person who wrote the above quote may have truly had a realization. But, if you write something like this, a voice inside should read it back and see if that voice says “really, seriously?”.
I think a lot of this new age writing is closer to fantasy than reality, but I want my fantasy to know itself to be a fictional story, an escape written to entertain. Magic does exist in real life but it is far more subtle. Maybe just the cooing of a mourning dove on a gray spring morning that makes you stop for a long moment.
Or a cold martini at a rooftop bar backlit by a smoky sunset.
It’s a tricky thing.
I started a story about a strange high school girl, based on someone I dated years ago, who was a genuine mystery. In the story she appears and disappears from the narrator’s life unexpectedly and he hears stories about her that make him realize he knew nothing about how her mind worked.
It was a love story of sorts, but also a story of mental illness. I eventually abandoned it because there was no strong thread holding it together that I could pull off. It had its moments, and those can be hard to leave behind to disappear into the digital fog, but ultimately I had to admit it wasn’t working.
I don’t know how often novelists I admire have this happen to them but I suspect most have had to deal with the proverbial ‘kill your babies’ thing. This is the deep editing that not all can do because it is hard. You want to hang onto the good stuff, maybe recycle it later, but in my experience once that bird is flown, it’s gone.
That deep editing, as opposed to copy editing, deals with continuity and pacing, the things that keep a story on track and moving along with a logic of its own. And it keeps the writer from leaving in those bits they like but that simply don’t have a function in the story that is necessary.
It’s frustrating to have to leave a story behind and it also happens with my non-fiction when I write a piece, come back to it, and see myself trying to make something make sense that doesn’t, at least not in a flow sense. This is usually where you find poor writing and, when it’s your own, you should be able to see it. And eventually unsee it.
New research finds that as many as 50% of US teens are suffering from depression some or most of the time. Social media has a lot to do with this and I suspect the Covid lockdowns contributed too. It explains a lot of Gen Z’s interest in topics variously described as personal growth and personal development, two of the most popular tags on Medium.
Reading and writing are great forms of self-therapy, but who has time when you’re glued to TikTok or Instagram? Personally I’d like to see schools ban the use of mobile phones during school hours, but that gets into the First Amendment issues which have become a major issue in American daily life these days.
Creativity guru Julia Cameron was a proponent of writing to ourselves daily, just a page, without self-censoring or editing. This might not be a bad idea in education except that if you require it you have to track it and then it’s not a personal journal anymore.
I’m actually a proponent of publishing your writing from day one, something I wish I’d been able to do when I was younger, although I’m quite happy that writing is not out there for anyone to find! But being social with your creative work helps us find community and kindred spirits. But there’s something else too.
I think a lot of people want to see their voices heard and want to communicate. That social media addiction does not fulfill that need because for most it’s one way. They see others doing things that they can’t do or who look like they don’t look. When you’re fifteen these differences are really painful.
I freely admit that my more opinionated writing reflects this same desire in me, the desire to speak my piece and be heard. It’s gratifying to find that I’m not the only one out here who is concerned about the state of the world. I wouldn’t know that so clearly if I wasn’t publishing.
The Grasshopper isn’t huge but my audience is more than I expected when starting out. The people who run Substack publish weekly interviews with newsletter writers that have attracted many thousands of subscribers and most of them seem to be writing about overcoming personal challenges.
But those editors skew young like most people working in what I call ‘pop tech’ as opposed to hard tech like business software. I’d like to see more variation in the type of content they feature when they highlight authors. It can’t all be introspective self-help stuff.
One can hope. There are thousands of these newsletters out there and many more being started as I write this. I read a comment in a Substack writer’s thread this morning where the writer said they were getting subscriptions even though they had not yet published anything! They were going to wait until they had more readers before they wrote anything.
Huh?
While I’m in anti-social media mode, I have to mention last night’s DeSantis Twitter disaster with Elon Musk, not just because it was a glitchy mess, but because you had a self-proclaimed defender of free speech (Musk) essentially endorsing a man who bans books and severely limits speech in education, among his many other attempts to control how people think (DeSantis).
I didn’t listen to it, not being very interested in either of them but it sounds like things went about as poorly as possible. Not much was said about policy or things like the impending debt ceiling debacle, in fact not much was said about anything that is actually real. There was quite a bit of talking about something called wokeness, which you’d think loomed as dangerously as climate change or mass shootings.
We are certainly in an Orwellian place right now, with its invented language and disregard for anything resembling the truth.
As writers, I would hope we take the mission of telling stories seriously and create what Hemingway would call honest writing. The world needs it.
Did you write today?
Martin
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