ZOOMING IN
There's a talent in the art of focus. It runs parallel to creativity I think. Sometimes zoomed out, running along side like a train moving beside you in the city. As it moves in closer, this parallel is like the atoms of everything. Done well it seems to almost touch the art. To be the art, but it is, just a part.
It's the piece of my writing I feel needs clutching. Drawing it closer in passed simple words and thoughts, deeper to the examples. The stories. The things that make you settle in and decide that what I'm saying applies. It's easy to stay zoomed out a little. It's safe but also mundane. Simple ideas still work. Simple examples bore and move the reader on to something, almost anything, that distracts and grabs their attention.
//
I've recently read The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman. A behemoth of a book. Not in its pages but in its detail, it's minutiae, seemingly incongruous example making that always leaves you feeling seen but also confused. How did he say these things in that way to describe an exact thing that I experienced, but am only realizing, in that way, because he just told me?
It's a trick of course. Hindsight is an intersection that brings ideas together. Sometimes merging smoothly. Sometimes t-boning your world with a fatal attack. It's easy (easier) to describe the past after the fact. Easy to tie together things that have happened by using different points of view to say "see. This is what we all were thinking." Just because it's easier doesn't make it any less artful. Or less powerful.
//
I've laboriously told you about what this is. These writings. I've tried to say they aren't crafted for a specific niche (they aren't...yet). I've spent days and weeks and months not writing. Considering. Searching for a greater umbrella of meaning to put up above my head after the rain has already fallen, curious as to why I'm still mostly just wet.
Recently I went so far as to explain that the whole thing is about depression. Which it is, and isn't at all. I meant that everything I do is ultimately steeped through a fine sieve of anxiety and depression because that is me. That's how I am wired and who I am. I went to great lengths explaining that this was a good thing. It is. Equally, maybe it isn't.
//
Today I started a book called They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, by Hanf Abdurraqib. It was recommended by a guy whom I accosted on the internet and who generously has taken these intrusions into his world as honest and harmless friend making. They are. I was on page 10 of this book of essays when I had the thought about focus that prompted me to stop reading and to start writing. The essay I was reading matters not. I imagine all of them will share the same thing. A focus. A zooming in on an idea or a thought so deeply that it makes you write about it. That you describe the story, the character, the minutiae
and you tie it to your thought and the emotions that it/they caused you to feel.
This is what is sometimes missing from what I write and I want to be better at that.
//
I recently met with a friend to catch up and mentioned that I'd read some of the things I'd written from three years ago and commented on the sarcasm and bombast that lived in the words. I proudly proclaimed that I'd progressed as a writer. That I was improving. This means something to me. Not just from the "wanting to do my best" standpoint but from readability.
There may be no specific unifying theme that's more important than a recognizable style and voice. The better I write, the more honest it feels and honesty trumps everything in writing. It's the glue. Ultimately this honesty becomes my voice.
As I flipped They Cant Kill Us Until They Kill Us over and began this, I read a couple of the "praise for Hanif Abduurraqib" blurbs on the back. One said something about "a collection of essays", and it was like unrelated synapses in my brain threw out electricity across that gooey gray mass behind my eyes and connected for the first time. That. Is what. I am. An essayist.
Of course it likely isn't that simple but it feels so right. A short piece of writing on a given subject. Of course there can be collections of essays on given themes. Related, parallel and tangential, collections. I'm not driven to write long stories. Novels. Hell, not even short stories. I relate simple ideas. Sometimes better than others. Most times relatable because they all are tied to our human experience.
For whatever reason, this simple defining, settled me. It made me want to write. It made me want to share and that, felt, good.
As the minutes passed by this thought took me from "none of this can be in a book, it's too all over the place" to planning on revisiting the hundreds of posts I've written through a new lens. To treat them as standalone essays that can be grouped with others or simply just be. A low hum of giddy excitement replaces the "this has run its course" feelings, more synapses shooting blindly, connecting, a comprehension replacing confusion.
//
This is why I always come back to write. There is always more there. More to see about myself. More to explore. The lenses turning counter and clock, bringing the letters into focus, letting them flow out. Viewing the world from up high and from the lows. Tying the seemingly unrelated together, to help explain now, and then, and tomorrow.
Most days I feel like writing is one of the most important things that I can do.
Today, the willingness to try again, proved me correct.
#hugsandhi5s
