on being a writer
My Best Friend is a writer. She identifies with it, it is part of who she is, and she's excellent at it.
I write a lot (516 published posts), but I do not and never have considered myself a writer. I'm somebody who writes. In a similar vein, I regularly do yoga, but I am no yogi.
It's an odd distinction. She told me once that I'm a writer. But it's just not something I feel in my bones, the way she seems to.
I kind of like writing, sometimes. But it's ... I think for me it's more of a tool. It's not that I need to write, but more that I need to express, to influence, to speak, to be heard, and sometimes to connect. Writing is a medium through which those other things can happen.
There's other goals I have that depend on writing, like my past work in local journalism and my hopes to return to local journalism in the future.
But I don't want to write local journalism because I care about writing. I want to write local journalism because I care about local politics, about access to information, about a functioning local democracy.
No doubt, she cares about those things too. But, I think if her worldly passions were different, she'd still need to write about them.
I need to do activism. I need to make a difference. I need to do something meaningful. At this time in my life, writing is the most accessible medium through which I can try to do that.
I am also a critic, in many respects. A commentator, perhaps. Maybe that's more fitting. I really enjoy having produced book reviews, but it's the generation of the critique that interests me, not the writing itself.
I also very strongly identify with being a programmer. I love coding. It just ... pulls me in. I have so many projects, and when I'm into one of them, I think about it at length. I love thinking about the structure of a program, about how to make that feature work, about how to make it easier to use. I've had to work really hard to overcome this habit (because it disrupted my sleep and mental wellbeing), but I used to just ruminate about code for hours. I'd do it before bed, I'd do it in bed, I'd go on walks and think about code, obsess about code.
I like to listen to programming podcasts, where people just talk about coding, coding culture, paradigms like "clean code" or whatever. I like hearing about projects people are working. I like hearing about how gaming-dev algorithms and AI-algorithms work even though I have no interest in writing them myself (also, fuck generative ai). I just fucking love code. The podcasts are basically useless to me. They don't make me a better programmer. But they feed my soul. I have no interest in this kind of thing when it comes to writing.
I don't think about sentence structure or what words would be nicer to use. I mean, yes, while writing I do think about that stuff some. But I write it, publish it, and I'm done. I just don't really care. I do sometimes write (bad) poems, and in these cases, I definitely think about my word choice and stuff. But it's more to produce a good poem and communicate my thoughts well than it is for the love of writing.
I definitely code in order to produce useful programs. But I also just do it for the love of coding. Idunno. There's just something in me that is deeply interested in and satisfied by it. I'm always wanting more (which perhaps means I'm not all that satisfied LOL).
Writing just doesn't have that same kind of spark for me.