About Me — Kaspar Sebastian
Using writing to steady my thinking
I rediscovered writing as the second-most pleasant past-time two years ago and joined Medium as a writer a bit over half a year ago. During these last eight months, I invested a humongous amount of time into just four stories. They all got boosted, along with my motivation to continue writing.
As a teenager and in my early twenties, I used to love to write. But a STEM major at university and, later, the communicative demands of work, made my writing increasingly transactional and bland.
I have mostly worked in English-speaking companies in a German-speaking environment and the exposure to international business English had erased my sense of what good writing is meant to be.
“I just wanted to check in with regards to last week’s productive conversation about the win-win potential of our premium offering? Have you thought about the discussed avenues of leveraging our collaboration to deliver tangible value-add for your clients?” — Nothing has changed since Orwell wrote in Politics and the English Language that “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” (although I must say I pursue my job sincerely and with pleasure).
In the one and a half years between the “rediscovery” (which was a more gradual process than the term suggests) and hitting Medium’s Publish button for the first time, I did four things:
- I increased the amount of fiction I read, that is, of writing that is interested in conveying truth.
- I started to read (for the first time) more writing about writing.
- I started to research the topic I wanted to first write about (see below).
- I wrote.
Of course I didn’t expect it would take one and a half years to feel ready.
Indeed, the most important thing I have learned (and learned to appreciate) is the incredible slowness of the writing process. At least of the kind of writing I grew to like and which I intend to use Medium for: Texts I wrest from a ghastly amount of academic research, in an attempt to see more clearly what the research reveals, and to convey what I hope to have learned in an engaging way, neither sacrificing rigor at the altar of entertainment, nor readability at the altar of jargon. And nothing at all — hopefully — at the gaudy altar of clickability.
I have always liked deep dives, but whatever steers my attention to deep-divable topics has rarely afforded me any influence on the selection of those topics. In other words: doing a deep-dive into something I am not excited about is physically impossible for me, but I usually find myself quite suddenly excited about something only after having slipped down the first meters of the rabbit whole already, once crawling back out would require the disciplined effort that any crawl against gravity on a slippery slope exacts. So I usually don’t exert that effort, and instead focus my attention (often, all my attention) on what lies below.
Before starting my new writing habit, my way out of a rabbit hole was usually a glitch in the game where I was teleported into bright daylight in the midst of running against the wall of yet another side-branch of the burrow — and then just moving on in a completely new direction never to look back at the pile of earth left behind. Now, the second most important thing I have learned, is that writing helps me stabilize my interest over time. That is, it has enabled me to remain interested in the same topic for much longer than I had previously been able to remain.
It was no news to me that writing helps one stabilize one’s thinking and attention in the very short term¹, I was glad to learn that, at least for me, a similar force is at work on a longer term too.
My (still ongoing) first series of Medium stories is all about one topic. So writing (and the mere prospect of writing) has helped me stabilize my interest for over two years now: for one and half years up to the first story of the series and for another eight months up to the present. My goal is to have finished the 6–7 essays that make up the series’ core by the end of this year.
But wait, what has this topic of “stabilized interest” actually been?
In short, I unearthed as much research about adult second language acquisition as possible, added my own language learning experience as binding agent, and got my hands dirty (and nerves stretched) in trying to shape something pretty and understandable out of this lump.
Whether I have succeeded is up to you to decide! As mentioned, the stories seem to align well with Medium’s vision for boostable stories. But whether that means I have succeeded is equally up to you to decide.
The stories are longish and offer riches neither of money nor of dopamine, but maybe an insight or two. I hope you’ll go along with Ursula Le Guin’s wisdom that “[A book] won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind.”
And I hope these insights into my writing process have revealed a few things About Me beyond what they quite obviously reveal. About my potential for being very excited about things, about the fact that I write as a hobby next to a bill-paying job, about my age, about my mother tongue, and most of all about my love of reading and languages.
Hi, Medium, it’s nice to meet you.
Two addendums:
- I want to thank Language Lab editor who has supported me from the very beginnign. Thank you so much!
- If you have a book or other resource that helped you in your writing, please share it through a response! It would be great to have a small collection of resources we all appreciate.
Oh and a postscript on AI. As mentioned, I write to chisel clarity out of things that seem inaccessible to me at first. In this, shortcuts would lead me away from my goal, not closer to it. The point is: for me, the writing is the point. So I don’t use AI for my writing process at all, including for things like asking for alternative ways to say something I have already written (that’s exactly where the chiseling happens, after all — I do use AI for research, but I still actually read every publication I cite). And I hope you believe me when I say that neither my tendency to start sentences with “And” nor my frequent use of the em-dash are “dead giveaways”. Pinky promise.
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¹This has been put to paper thousands of times in thousands of shades, as in E.M. Forster’s “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?” (although the Quote Investigator suggests Forster was actually not the first to have used that phrase). Some day we’ll probably dig out a cuneiform tablet that says more or less the same thing.
Le Guin’s quote is from “Words Are My Matter: Writings about Life and Books, 2000–2016”. Small Beer Press, Easthampton, MA, 2016.
