Writing

I'm often jealous of people with a strong creative muscle, one hypertrophied by years and years of training in their discipline. Be it drawing, making music, games, poetry or writing.

I'm not proficient in any of these. In fact, most of them I've never even tried seriously, or at least with decent effort put in. It's always bothered me a lot, and it's something I've wanted to change for a while now, but I never could find the time, the inspiration or the right approach.

I tried writing recently. Nothing particularly ambitious, I haven't set any goal for myself, like writing a short story or anything like that. Just jot down anything I have in mind at the moment, or if there's some topic that I feel strongly about. Trying to keep a journal too, but I've never been successful at maintaining one for more than weeks at a time, due to laziness and generally being a very distracted human being. Might be because of ADHD (no diagnosis though).

Writing struck me as a good choice because, not unlike programming, it's very accessible. Ideally, you only need a pen, some paper and a clear state of mind. In my case, add a laptop to the mix.

However, the problem with starting something is that it's hard. In a lot of ways. You're now going to have to allocate time in your day for your new habit, and you'll have to be consistent about it if you ever want to see some results. And more importantly, at least for me, you're going to be so terrible at first, finding motivation won't be easy. Especially if you're used to being good at something immediately, or not doing it at all.

But how do you get better at anything? By doing it, of course, but then what? You'll also need to review what you've done, take note of your mistakes and then avoid repeating them. But how are you going to notice your mistakes, if you have no idea what you're doing? You're going to ask people for feedback? What if you're too shy for that! Well, worry not, technology has got us covered. Surely, entering what you wrote inside some program and getting some numbers in return will make you much better at writing, and improve your enjoyment of it, right?

So after giving it no consideration at all, since in my head no harm could come from it, I decide to use grammarly, to get an idea of how many mistakes I make, how common and dumb they are and, ultimately, how to fix them.

The first thing I get, after copying one of my notes in their interface, is the large number of mistakes in the short text. Spelling, grammar, punctuation. And that's fine, those happen to everyone and the only way to deal with them is to reread very carefully and fixing them. Or, if you're feeling lazy or don't want to fall victim to distraction, use the very basic spelling check all text editors have.

Great, all those mistakes are now gone, but grammarly still doesn't seem satisfied. No, in fact there are still a few stats that don't seem acceptable, namely engagement, delivery, unique words and rare words. All of them are not great and below standards.

I don't know why I found reading those statistics so unpleasant. I might have unconsciously thought writing would be something easy, that I'm already used to and that comes naturally to me. I was competent at school, surely I would do fine when judged by some algorithm.

I'm sure part of the reason why I'm not as good as I thought I would be, is because now I almost uniquely write in English, while most of my life I've only used Italian. I consider myself to have some level of mastery in English, but apparently I must still be better at communicating in Italian, my first language.

There are a lot of differences between the writing styles in the two. In Italian, sentences are usually longer, as with most latin languages, and there's a lot of indirect ones and subordinate propositions, with the frequent use of commas. Instead, in English sentences are usually shorter and concise. Separated by dots or periods.

So, now that I was done making excuses for myself, I had to decide what to do. What is more important for me? Should I be happy with simply getting thoughts out of my head, getting the satisfaction of being able to communicate in a more verbose way than say, a post on mastodon, or should I try to improve my skills as a writer?

The former seems to be the more personal and even egotistical approach. Choosing to not actively invest the time to improve feels like saying to the world "Here's some of my unfiltered, completely raw thoughts. Wondering why they feel so inaccessible? Because they're for me, certainly not for you!"

Instead, the latter is more worried about what other people might think. It's trying to accommodate them and make their stay inside my head worthwhile.

In the end, the ability to convey information in a clear and (not always) succinct way seems like an important skill, one worth cultivating. I'll try to get better at expressing myself and my thoughts, so maybe I'll be able to do them justice.