My Writing Life

This essay was written in response to the topic Write a creative reflection on ‘My writing life.’ for a Professional Writing course at La Trobe University.

Writing has always had some sort of fascination for me. I’ve been a working adult for over 30 years now and I’ve always thought I wanted to “be a writer”. I’ve read countless books on writing, I’ve published blogs and social media, and I’ve persisted with fitful attempts to keep a journal. But while they’ve certainly involved all sorts of writing, my work and my hobbies have been centred on other things. I still want to be a writer.

Why? What is writing to me? First, it’s a way to clarify my own thoughts and memories. My head is full of half-thought ideas and a general vague sense I understand things. But if I actually pull on these threads and try to knit together coherent ideas or concepts, the jumbled tangle of words quickly makes it obvious how little I actually “know”. Writing allows me to organise these ideas.

Perhaps just as importantly—and obviously—writing is a way to communicate.

I was a classic maths and science geek from the start. As a toddler I hung out in my dad’s shed, gaping at the bewildering array of tools and gadgets and perpetually half-finished projects. In primary school I struggled with spelling but breezed through times tables. By the time I got to high school, I was terrified of English and the other “soft” subjects. I avoided essay writing by any means I could. But I did read a lot, and I particularly enjoyed reading books written by great popularisers of science like Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, and Carl Sagan. In fact I have a vague memory of trying to emulate Sagan in a short story I had to write in Year 9. It was not great! But it did plant the idea that writing was important even in the hard sciences, and that even a science geek could be a writer.

Unsurprisingly for someone with an interest in ideas and a background in science and technology, I also read a lot of science fiction. The best examples of this genre tackle deep ideas—consciousness, time travel, the nature of reality—in ways that are astonishingly inventive, but are so approachable that you only notice how far your mind has been stretched when you get to the end and reflect on the story’s meaning (Chiang 2015, p. 91).

Fast forward another twenty years and I am deep into my career as a software engineer—and if the sciences have a reputation for dense and clumsy attempts at communication, wait until you meet computer programmers! I’ve been fortunate to work with people who are capable of clear and concise technical writing. They show that it is possible. For example, Simon Harris writes about complex topics in a way that is accessible, jargon-free, and easy to follow (Harris 2011). Like all of my role models, he is able to express complex concepts in a clear, engaging, and straightforward way, without dumbing down or losing the richness of the idea.

So am I a writer? I still find the process of writing for public consumption slow and torturous. I tend to agonise over every word and every sentence. How can I make it clearer? More concise? As Blaise Pascal quipped, “I have made this [letter] longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” (Shapiro & Epstein 2006, p. 583). This is not helped by my impulse to be perfect. Like Joseph Grand in Camus’s The plague, I want to craft the perfect sentence, but I never get past that first step (Camus 1960, p. 87). How can you be a writer if you don’t write?

From my earliest days of writing essays in school, teachers emphasised that “you have to have a plan, and start with an outline”. Of course I rarely ever did, and even now I tend to approach most writing tasks by thinking “ok I need to explain X” and then just banging it out. This might work ok for writing a journal, just to get things out of my head; the words flow. But this writing is rambling and often incoherent. The result is not a finished piece I would show to anyone. I don’t think of myself as a creative writer. My goals are more about academic and technical writing. But we are storytelling creatures, and the best academic and technical writing—like all writing—tells a story. I’m sure my writing would be more effective, and have more of these qualities I aspire to, if I thought more about the structure of what I write and spent more time planning how I will present my ideas as a cohesive story.

It is this process of looking at a jumbled mess of wool, pulling on a thread, and trying to knit something whole from it that motivates me to keep trying. The writers I admire the most are able to take complicated, extraordinary ideas and lay them out in such a clear way they seem self-evident. My goal—the act of me being a writer—is to find some of this clarity of expression, and through my writing help people grasp important ideas.

I write to share ideas with the world, open people’s eyes, and maybe change their minds. This has always been hard, and slow, and underscored by the suspicion that I actually have nothing interesting to say. But then I remember it is exactly the act of working out what I think, and what I need to say, that is being a writer.

References

Camus, A 1960, The plague, Penguin modern classics, Penguin, Harmondsworth.

Chiang, T 2015, Stories of Your Life and Others, Tor UK.

Harris, S 2011, Detecting unspecified method arguments in Ruby, https://www.harukizaemon.com/blog/2011/04/11/detecting-unspecified-method-arguments-in-ruby/, viewed 10 August 2020.

Shapiro, FR & Epstein, J 2006, The Yale Book of Quotations, Yale University Press, New Haven, UNITED STATES.