I sometimes (jokingly… but actually semi truthfully) tell people that the moment I quit writing is when I read ‘Stories of Your Life’ by Ted Chiang. It is objectively an exceptional piece of writing, not lest because its subject matter is Language itself; however, it impacted me personally in that after I finished reading it I was left with such a feeling of awe that (at least subconsciously) convinced me that I no longer wanted to write anything anymore. When such a masterpiece already exists in the world, what more could I add?
I’d never actually wanted to become A Writer, but I did write a lot in high school in my spare time, and I could even allow myself to say that I enjoyed it. I even thought that it would be fun some day to publish a book. I blogged relatively frequently during my teens, and wrote essays for my high school English classes that I was actually pretty happy with. Incidentally, all the writing I did in high school unintentionally prepared me quite well for my college application (the one where you have to succinctly present a personal essay encapsulating All You Are, All You Have Achieved, and All You Can Contribute [in 500 words or less]) — I’m aware this is a painful part of the application for many, but I wrote the bulk of my essay in one night as if it were a blog post.*
However, with the advent of starting college in the US, having to focus on learning to live in a new culture, keeping up with classes and extracurriculars, and struggling with some at-least-mild form of self-diagnosed seasonal depression (Massachusetts has terrible winters), the little writing I did in college mostly came in the form of papers for classes and I blogged less and less. There are still a couple of papers (actually… maybe just one) I am relatively proud of that I wrote in college, but the majority of them were mostly slogs that took hours and my heart wasn’t in it.
During college, I also began to change my relationship with my past writing. I was learning so much about historical contexts of human existence that the writing I did in high school no longer felt interesting or significant. What more was I adding to the world with my writing? It was the epitome of /r/im14andthisisdeep. At best unoriginal, at worst embarrassingly cringeworthy (*honestly, my college essay was pretty rambly too. I must have been accepted on other merits). Sure, I enjoyed being expressive with language, but there was no original content in my head that was worth sharing. To this day, the few pieces I’m still relatively happy with that I wrote in high school are largely flowery expressive pieces that have no narrative, moral, or informational substance whatsoever. And, actually, I don’t feel particularly compelled a decade later to keep writing that kind of piece.
Stories of Your Life is not a story that I would have written, nor one that even I wish I had written. But it came at the time where I was feeling this way and became the nail in that coffin. It felt like the antithesis of what I had written in the past and anything I could write in the future. The language is simple on the surface but with layers of meaning given the subject of the story, the narrative is original, well bounded in both textual length and internal logic, and I couldn’t put it down. My terrible philosophizing writing had mostly been drunkenly and aggressively approaching and then falling over questions of “How does the world work?” (though I suppose, I wouldn’t fault a teenager for having these thoughts), whereas here was this fresh piece rather asking “What if it was like this?” and then lucidly running with it. I was exasperated. How could Mr. Chiang say so much with so little? How could he make me feel all these things and have all these thoughts with so few words?! It is probably still my favorite piece of writing in the world!
These days, I write approximately nothing for pleasure (both mine and others), with what I do write falling loosely in the categories of: 1) Facebook Messenger trolling, 2) emails, or 3) software engineering design documentation (very difficult to read for pleasure, but also very important for my day job). Heck, I even barely read anymore. So I guess you may be asking, why am I writing this? Honestly, I’m not too sure myself. It’s been many months of pandemic already and maybe I just finally broke. Or maybe I just finally have a desk at home again and it feels like the right thing to do, to write a blog post, when I have a desk that feels like home. Maybe I’m just desperately trying to fill the blog section on my website with something so I don’t have to recycle any old writing. Maybe I really need to get this out of my system so I can start writing new things again, even if unoriginal, awkward, and not worth others’ time. I have to be ok with that too. I think it would be good for me, to write again.