I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
It’s been a while since I published an article via my newsletter, which is where I write for more public consumption. This here is more a quasi-private journal, as few people read it. I get about ten visitors here a day.
I started an article inspired by the Nietzsche/Nehamas idea of life as literature — or, alternately, the textuality of life — and I’m having a difficult time getting it to the point that I want to share it.
Part of the difficulty I’m having may be because I’m not just writing about other people’s ideas, not just sharing what Nietzsche thinks, or what Nehamas thinks about what Nietzsche thinks. I’m constructing my own philosophy.
In some ways I am experiencing exactly the issue I am trying to communicate: that it is difficult if not impossible in nonfiction prose to express certain complicated ideas about what it means to have a good life, and how one should life in order to have a good life.
Nietzsche chose certain ways of writing to communicate his difficult ideas. For example, in Twilight of the Idols, he used an aphoristic and polemical style. Later, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra he used novelistic fiction to communicate core ideas including the death of God, the will to power, and eternal recurrence.
Kierkegaard as well didn’t just write dry philosophical essays. In books like Either/Or he created distinct fictional authors to present differing life views. His book were “edited” by yet another character, Victor Eremita.
Philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote so many novels exploring the question of how to live a good life that she may be better named a novelist than a philosopher.
The existentialists Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus wrote plays and novels to explore the anxiety of human freedom, the human search for meaning, and more.
At different times, I’ve explored various ways of communicating what I want to communicate: straightforward nonfiction articles, memoir essays plus paintings, a screenplay.
The difficulty I’m facing is this: I’m trying to communicate the idea that straight prose explanations don’t work well to communicate complicated ideas using straight prose explanations!
And straight prose explanations flatten real life, just as overlaying the language of twelve steps, recovery, and addiction flattened the story that Elizabeth Gilbert might have told in her most recent memoir.
Today, I’m going to start my article over again, and use more storytelling and less exposition. I’m going to write it in a roundabout and inefficient way. I’m going to lean harder on “for instances” and less on explanation.