I Hate Most Writing (Sorry)

I haven’t found many friends yet on Substack, but the ones I have found are very very dear to me. I feel like I’m beginning to find my people. And it makes me realise — or rather, remember — what it it is about writing and literature that draws me to it so powerfully.

For a while, lost in the sludge of the generic main page, I felt Substack making my writing actively worse. I tried to write a Classic Substack Post, and all of my punch was gone, softened into the generic, polite Writer Voice. It was Nothing. Who would want to read this? Not even I was interested about what I had written. And I was writing about sex addiction! How did I make sex addiction boring?

In the harsh contrast to the writing I’ve now found that makes me feel alive — words that jolt something awake in me, even if it’s just a brief note — I’ve come to face something I already kind of silently knew: I hate most people’s writing.

This is harsh. And I feel bad about it. And I feel especially bad about posting it on the ~writer website~. But in order to preserve what I do love about writing, I need to maintain the honest integrity I laud it for as a medium.

I hate ~writing~. I hate pieces written by people trying to be ~writers~ with their typewriter-in-the-café aesthetic and long, metaphor heavy, beautiful sentences. This is a projection of mine, a spiteful, hateful one, one that pre-emptively rejects those who would be my peers. One I struggle to cohere with my firm ideological support of any and everyone’s creative expression.

But.

I don’t want to hear about your emotions.

I want to hear you describe mine.

My favourite books have told me something about myself. Not Forever But For Now by Chuck Palahniuk (he’s here on Substack too! — my beloved <3) felt like a spiritual experience for me. Like it served me up my own repressed trauma, pre-processed.

And I know, I know, I’m not special, different, or unique. The universal — or even the more identity-related — human experiences being described in this waffling poetic prose that makes me restless are things I would be able to find in myself and relate to, if I felt the text speaking to me.

But, for reasons I can’t explain, most writing doesn’t speak in my register. It doesn’t sound like it’s addressing me. It feels like it’s addressing someone else — the others, those whose consciousnesses live in this dreamy, ethereal veil — and in such, it alienates me from the experience it’s trying to get me to relate to.

My writing isn’t beautiful, it’s gross. My writing isn’t lyrical, it’s blunt. My writing isn’t fluid, it’s choppy.

Chuck Palahniuk is “my beloved <3” because reading a style that resembled mine in an actual published book for the first time made me realise that I could write, too. That the way I write is valid. It is writing. I could write, too.

Substack’s generic feed almost killed off my passion and interest in what is my greatest talent and pride in a matter of days, because the type of writing I was being exposed to alienated me. This was writers, this was writing, and if it doesn’t speak to me, than I must be a bad writer. For the first time in my life, I wanted to be a ~writer~. I felt something to prove with the way I was choosing to write. I tried to fit in to what writing looked like. I stifled myself, out of fear I alienate the other writers. And it alienated me from me.

But writing that speaks to me, oh, words that speak to me, they connect me with myself. Whether they come from myself or someone else, if the words ring in my register, I can point to that feeling of synthesis and yell “me!”.

That, that, is connection.

What I’m getting at, is that now, having begun to find my people, my little needles in the haystack, the voices that sound like mine in chorus, I am reunited with what I love about the written word.

Resonance.

It’s not about sounding pretty. It’s not a fucking craft to produce identical output. To resemble something that looks good is not what makes good writing. Good writing cuts deep. The prose comes secondary to the affect. The cadence comes secondary to the narrative. God, this craft! This beautiful craft! The way we bend grammar around the shape of words to elicit a specific, carefully curated impression.

This is just a really long love letter to the people I have found so far, who nourish the flavour of writing that feels like me. And a plea to the gods that I find more.

I can’t wait to read all of your stuff, I’m starving for it. <3

The biggest joke of it all, is that I think many writers feel this way. There isn’t The Generic Prose and then the Good Prose That Resonates. That, that, is the beauty of the craft!! What resonates is unique, it connects you with the natural emergent voice inside you. The sharper it’s shaped like you, the closer you become to hearing your own voice in your head. That’s why your writing needs to sound like you. Why it’s critical that language is given the space to take your shape.

And I think maybe that’s why I hate the writing that feels like it’s trying to be writing, or writing that is performing what writing is supposed to be. It’s speaking in nobody’s voice. It’s a narrative performance of personhood, it’s aesthetics with no substance. It carries nothing human. It’s writing that’s too busy being writing to sound like a human’s spirit.

Oh yeah, this post was originally supposed to be about the flattening and commercialisation of writing castrating it of its power — it’s why I founded a whole writer’s circle in my city specifically to foster a type of writing that’s allowed to breathe and stretch and explore the possibilities of word’s effect.

One of the internet’s most beloved poems was written by a six year old:

The tiger

He destroyed his cage

Yes

YES

The tiger is out

Your writing is good as long as it carries something human. It’s already inside you. Language is a marble rock, and you’re carving a mirror of yourself out of it. And I’m still going to hate some of it. Simply because your statue doesn’t look like me. But that’s okay <3 As long as it looks like you, it will be resonating with one person: you. And, being human as you are, that pretty much guarantees it will resonate with someone else. More than an ornate surface-level arrangement of stylistic devices ever will.

Idk that’s my opinion.

I leave you with some words from Victor Jones, a musical artist whose lyrics speak in my register, somehow:

Sometimes I see nothing in people

Here is the church, and here is the steeple

You’re sending me an invite to a networking event

I’m in your building and I’m crawling through the vents

I am a product of time and motion

I know the best spot for beer in Brooklyn

I’m in the garden and I’m eating all the dirt

I get hurt