reflections on writing

passing the oyster

A couple of years ago, my friend was seeing this girl who wanted to be a writer. She had recently finished college but had decided that she didn’t have enough life experience just yet. So she moved to Providence, Rhode Island. I never stopped finding that funny.

Moving to New York or deep in the woods I could understand, but Providence was right there in the middle: neither a large enough city for the romantic stories of being lost in your twenties and serendipitously saved, nor an isolated shelter to explore the depths of your mind and soul. You couldn’t write Frances Ha or become the next Thoreau. What was she looking to find?

When I started writing this blog in October, I regarded myself with the same snobbish and judgmental gaze. My last four years were also spent in Providence, after all. I didn’t have crazy life experiences to relay, nor was I particularly knowledgeable about anything. I was also not particularly eloquent, and while I could (and did, at times) hide behind the ESL excuse, I knew that time was ticking and soon the excuses would not matter. You either had something interesting to offer or you didn’t.

All the overthinking I initially did was completely useless though. I see that clearly when I look back. In the end, I ended up writing whatever I could write. I just did so with crippling anxiety and imposter syndrome. But I kept reminding myself of the advice my friend had given me, though I only half-believed it at the time: “You’ve never written anything like this before. You don’t know what your good writing looks like. You just have to write and after your first ten posts or so, you can start looking back and seeing what you liked and didn’t like. Then you can start to worry about quality.”

He was right. My initial worries were useless because they were wildly unspecific. I just felt everything was shit, so there was nothing to hold onto, no sense of how things could get better. It was only after writing a few posts that I started developing a more refined judgment of what was good and bad in my own writing.

This is my 21st post. I know I’ve gotten much better, though I wouldn’t exactly say I’m good just yet. But honestly, being good doesn’t matter as much as I thought it did. The feeling of improvement is enough to keep going. It’s probably even more of a fuel than self-satisfaction.

There are times when I drift away from the writing, discouraged that there is still a long way to go, maybe even too long for a lifetime. But it helps to go back to my previous posts in those moments and to find a sentence here and a paragraph there that I like. Sometimes I’ll even encounter some cool idea that I had long forgotten, some interesting point or connection I had made. Those are the moments I feel genuinely proud of myself and realize that my writing might have something to offer.

Among my friends, I am often described as either the deep thinker or the overthinker, dependent on my friends’ moods and their willingness to go down the rabbit holes of my mind. The redeeming side is that I get to say a little insightful tidbit every now and then because I think so much about everything. And that, I’ve come to realize, is also the hope I have for my writing.

I was having a little Parisian moment yesterday, sitting in a French restaurant by myself, watching the people walking by and sipping my beer (yes, not wine, I am sorry). I brought out my book too, but just as I was getting ready to read, I got interrupted by the woman sitting next to me. “Are you visiting?”

“No,” I said, “I live here.” I only turned halfway toward her, afraid of being too encouraging. She was in her fifties, wearing a silky dress and a lot of clearly expensive jewelry. She kept asking me questions and at some point, I realized her desire for company was too strong: I’d have to give in. So I started asking her questions, to at least make the conversation interesting.

The first thing I learned about her was that her father and grandfather had both gone to Columbia, and her mother and grandmother to Barnard. She jokingly offered the waiter a glass of wine, and I wondered why rich people do this when they know the offer cannot be accepted. We were off to a rough start. I was already crafting the story I would tell my friends about this cringy woman who wouldn’t leave me alone as she told me about her life in New York, which made me feel like an asshole soon after.

I learned that she had lost her husband three years ago. He was a pilot and she a flight attendant. That’s how they met. They traveled all over the world together, never had kids. “Honestly, I think I am too selfish for kids,” she told me. She had been engaged once to a different guy, but she was single now. All her friends had moved away, so she was pretty much by herself in New York. She still worked though, was flying to Prague tomorrow. She was kind and thoughtful as she talked about her life experiences— experiences I was sure I could learn a lot from.

“I wish I was your mother,” she said at some point, somewhat awkwardly. There was a brief pause. I could feel that her relationship to her decisions was becoming increasingly bittersweet as her life went on. She still stood by them, she stood by the life she had had until this point, but now that her husband was gone and her friends away with their families, I imagined there were some regrets. There was some emptiness, some desire to have someone to pass on the legacy to, to feel your life had some meaning outside of itself. I imagine that’s why she was so insistent on talking to me.

I playfully asked her what she would have told me if I were her daughter, what advice she would give. Honestly, I think part of me wanted to distract her from her thoughts, to make everything a bit lighter. What was surprising (and disappointing, at the time) was that from then on, she produced nothing but clichés.

She told me that the world was my oyster at least five times. She told me “avoid making bad decisions,” which I thought was a joke, so I gave a chuckle that actually ended up annoying her. I asked which decisions were bad, since, if I could classify them as such, I surely would avoid them anyway. She said, “you know, avoid bad bad decisions.” I’m sure I was looking very puzzled, but she just kept repeating the same words. Was she talking about drugs? Kids? Wrong husband? I had no clue what she was trying to say. In the end, I gave up, and when she asked me if I understood, I said “I think so?” and we dropped it. But the conversation did not get any better after that.

The funny part is, I’m sure I could have learned a lot from her. I’m sure she had deep insightful things she could have told me. But somehow, asking her to distill it for me had made all of the insight evaporate and all that was left was some scattered residue that could only express itself in the form of clichés that were basically meaningless. It reminded me of this passage I had read a few days ago by Huxley— a passage I thought was kind of brutal at the time, but have come to agree with more since.

All human beings feel very much the same emotions; but few know exactly what they feel or can divine the feelings of others. Psychological insight is a special faculty, like the faculty for understanding mathematics or music. And of the few who possess that faculty only two or three in every hundred are born with the talent of expressing their knowledge in artistic form. Let us take an obvious example. Many people, most people perhaps, have been at one time or another violently in love. But few have known how to analyze their feelings and fewer still have been able to express them. The love letters that are read aloud in divorce courts and at the inquests on romantic suicides prove how pathetically inept as literary artists, even when genuinely “inspired,” the majority of human beings are. Stilted, conventional, full of stock phrases and timeworn, unmeaning rhetorical tropes, the average love letter of real life would be condemned, if read in a book, as being in the last degree “insincere.” I have read genuine letters written by suicides just before their death, which I should, as a reviewer, have pilloried for their manifest “insincerity.” And yet, after all, it would be difficult to demand of a man a higher proof of sincerity of his emotions than that which he furnishes by killing himself because of them. Only suicides of talent write letters that are artistically “sincere.” The rest, incapable of expressing what they feel, are compelled to fall back on the trite, “insincere” rhetoric of the second-rate novel.

It wasn’t that the feelings and experiences she had gone through in life were superficial. But she somehow lacked the ability to express their depth, maybe even to herself. I realized that this is one thing that reading good writing can help you with. You can find the words to express yourself in someone else’s writing, or the framework to understand yourself. You can read something that perfectly portrays what you’ve felt so many times, and yet you had never managed to put it that clearly. You had never managed to understand that feeling so well until you read it in their words.

I still think it’s funny to move to Providence for life experience, but I understand it more. I don’t think we truly understand even the most ordinary life, we don’t fully comprehend the depths of the emotions, thoughts, and experiences all of us go through regularly. That is why we need good writers and that, I’ve realized, is the whole reason I like to write (and want to study philosophy, for that matter): so my overthinking mind can produce a few “aha!” moments, mostly for myself, but hopefully for others too from time to time. Maybe I am biased, but I think that, in the end, few things matter as much as our ability to make sense of our lives.