About My inability to write is matched only by my inability to accept praise for my writing. Without wallowing in self pity, there’s been quite enough of that already this month, my reach has rarely matched my ambition, my ideas rarely reaching what might be their full potential. Though I generally obfuscate when asked why I’m still writing this blog after nearly ten years, the truth I’ve probably been hiding is that it’s because I continue to be under the delusion that at some point I’ll be able to write the perfect blog post, an act of Platonic perfection with all the hallmarks of God’s final message to his creation. Since I’m not God and a negligible writer expect me to be still posting here in another ten years.
If I do have a strength, it’s my ability to fill a blank page and work through seven paragraphs on a given topic even when I’m not really in the mood. That’s why I keep setting myself these challenges, on filmographies and television series, art festivals and these annual reviews, to keep my brain working, to let the words pour out of me and hope they make some sense. The best part of any piece is the moment before I type, looking for the killer first line, hoping against hope it will set the tone for what is to come. Sometimes it will take hours, days even, and sometimes as on this occasion it popped into my head while I cleaning my teeth. I grinned just long enough for the toothpaste to dribble out of my mouth onto my t-shirt.
My weakness is an inability to plan ahead. My writing tends to be fairly shapeless because too often, after pouring myself into that first paragraph, I’m spent, knowing that there’s still many more sentences to come and because I’m such a slow writer, hours and hours spend working through about seven paragraphs or a thousand words, I actually become quite angry with it before the end. Time and again I’ll reach the fourth paragraph and scream in frustration because nothing before it makes any practical sense or even flows from idea to idea. Even one of my best pieces of writing, my MA Dissertation, which I spent an entire summer writing, got lost somewhere in the second chapter before making a break for freedom in the third.
Which is why so much of my writing tends to be so self-conscious, referring to its own construction or making jokes at the expense of itself, because I’ve never quite developed the knack of structuring an argument properly. Most often, there’s a concertina effect in which paragraphs can be added and subtracted from the middle without doing much to the overall structure of the piece when the best writing I’ve seen is intricate enough that the sense is destroyed by the loss of a single line. This also has the effect of making some of my writing far longer than it needs to be because my internal copy editor retired many years ago due to overwork. I believe she’s living in Southend now in the guest house set up by her friend, my vocabulary, which absconded in 2005.
But my main problem, other than not being able to find a better way to begin this paragraph than with “but my main problem”, is that I spend too much time comparing myself with other writers, and not being able to calculate how they seem to make their work apparently so effortless, with such wit. Every now and then I’ll see a Deborah Orr in The Guardian beginning a paragraph with “Oddly enough though” and realise that sometimes there isn’t a better way but in the main I’m astonished by how William Goldman is able to find ten different ways of saying the same thing or Charlie Brooker manages to be funny and thoughtful at the same time. My only comfort is that my favourite writer of all, or at least the writer I steal from the most, Douglas Adams, had an equally tortured approach.
My litany of stylistic quirks (which does also include ellipses and sub-clauses) features the deliberate repetition of words in a sentence designed to draw attention to themselves because they’re the deliberate repetition of words in a sentence designed to draw attention to themselves, inveterate use of prop words like probably, actually, though, even, usually, often, because, essentially, generally, seem, nevertheless, but and true, oh and like, and using the phrase “oh and” a lot. I’m alliterative and also apply allusion, anaphora and antithesis whenever possible but generally misuse onomatopoeia and parenthesis. I seem also to employ synecdoche correctly, but most often it's an act of desperation so that I’m not repeating the same word twice in the sentence or even paragraph which I was taught against at school.
Whenever I put finger to keyboard, I’m fighting against two enemies, reader expectation and myself. The former I can’t do much about. After clicking the post button, there's always a moment when I simply want to run far away, which is quickly followed by about half an hour of reading through the piece again and noticing all the painful typos and poor structuring (this piece used to have eight paragraphs but I couldn't find a way of padding out a bit about me not having a recognisably personal style). I’ll probably do this same with this (oh). There’s also the younger version of me, which could be the person writing last month, last year or ten years ago, the one who, whenever I get lost in the archives of this blog, I admire deeply, who I’m constantly surprised by. Over and over I’ll ask, why can’t I write as well as that any more? What happened to that person? Then I correct some of the typos and resume the struggle.
Graham Kibble-White is one of the writers on www.tvcream.co.uk.
Tough question but definitely an interesting one
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