Purple

It’s difficult to express yourself with writing.

In the art world, they have this concept called “symbol drawing” which they hope to beat out of every beginner. (I began looking into art but that’s another story). It’s where you draw your internal representation of things than how it actually is. You must train your eye repeatedly to see things as it is rather than how you think it is. Folds in the eye, interplay of shadow and all of the other fundamentals.

Painting and writing share some aspects that I’ve only recently noticed — I wouldn’t call myself a writer by any means, since I’ve never made a strong attempt toward making a story. I’ve tried before, but it’s hard. I have a lot of respect for writing stuff and making it feel seamless. Mine feels jagged at best when I think about it. Whenever I try to expand it feels purple. How do they do it?

Just as there is symbol drawing, I think there is symbol writing. We want to capture a moment. But the moment is more than just the focal point. Drawing is a careful mixture of hue, saturation, brightness, depth, and more. It takes time. You layer each part until it fits. The same way writing is. Every word you put down must add something toward the whole frame. You must pay attention to the beginning, middle, and end, with the flint in between. To plant everything you need, sources of emotion or props for the finale.

People resort to symbol drawing or symbol writing because it’s easier. Or it’s all they know. Instead of taking the time to share why it is exciting, one can just use a bigger word and mark it as done — the same way someone will do two circles and a line for a face. But you’ll struggle if you start at the top of the rollercoaster. In medias res is hard to pull off because you rarely want to jump around and merge the picture together. How else can you convey the release of anxiety other than build it up by detailing the long wait?

Writing is difficult because you’re transforming the usual vernacular into something that is timelessly engrossing. Due to that difficulty, I sometimes fall into symbol writing instead: where I just detail my own internal representation of the moment without considering the entire composition — in hopes that we can just get to the good part.

To avoid reflexively resorting to symbol writing, I use real life conversation as a reference — especially because I’m writing posts, not existential romanticism. There’s this thin line you can pass. Slowly build up the bricks to be just barely above conversational tone but below full out Latin verse. Reading out loud what I may have written in the past, it’s hard to say who is behind some of those posts because the thought of it as a conversation makes me cringe! Even exclamation marks are something I’ve only recently used, but it is difficult to use them correctly without feeling purple.

It’s difficult. It’s hard to know what to include or ignore. It’s hard to say what’s superfluous or needs more. Dostoevsky has paragraphs spanning pages and just never stops the whole scenery. I don’t know how he does it; how he knows what to omit and make explicit. It’s hard, but you can learn it. I’ll be writing for a lifetime and you will too. Learning how to build the bricks seems to be a skill that’ll pay ten-fold if you pay attention.

I actually might pick up some writing books. Even if I never make a book — I can’t imagine myself writing any fiction frankly — to know the craft of writing is to improve your expression. Where you actually capture the whole moment.

This pseudonym opens a portal where I can write absolutely anything. But I find as soon as I am unable to keep it conversational, I am departing reality, which violates a principle I don’t want to give up. To enhance reality, not escape it. All too easy to open an escape hatch. Wrote all of this out to remind myself not to take this freedom of expression and find myself stuck in my own Laputa.