What I Want to Write About
Often finding what it is that I want to write about is the hardest part. With most other writing courses, the topic of my writing was either forced upon me or easy enough to figure out. In this course, the topic can for the most part be about anything, so long as it is key to my identity. For me, this posed some challenges: I don’t like writing about myself nor do I feel the need to express what I thought of as my identity. While I read other student’s work about their gender, race, ability, and so forth, I didn’t feel that I really cared about writing about any of that. Even though my surface level identity is important to me and carries a lot of weight in my life, it just felt strange to write about it. In my posts, I didn’t really need to write about my identity, and I felt free to write about whatever it is that I wanted. In the longer writing prompts however, because of my ideas of what identity means, I was stuck into this belief that I needed to write about my characteristics.
Whenever people talk about identity, they usually only mention the surface level identity, usually the first things that people notice about someone. During my WP3, I had a great challenge stemming from this idea of identity whereby I knew that my piece was personal and was greatly ingrained in my identity, but it also wasn’t really about me or my identity. Through working on WP3, and needing to reconcile this problem, I was able to redefine identity to be much more about our life experiences. If you define identity as a mere combination of attributes, you miss out on much more subtle and complex identities. Often I hear about intersectionality and identity, but intersectionality doesn’t truly consider the nuances in experience, but rather tries to understand complex experiences as multiple parts of one’s identity working together. This isn’t to say that intersectionality is bad, but rather goes to show the complexity of identity and how it really cannot be fully understood. In WP3, my identity in it goes far beyond the intersection between game design and spirituality, but rather ties into how the boundaries between identities move and affect each other.
Writing allowed me to better understand the ideas that I want to share. One problem that I always faced during this course was not being concise. This was quite strange to me considering that in high school, I always received feedback that I was very concise. One question that should be answered is “why should writing be concise?” At the start of this course I would’ve answered that concision makes writing more understandable, but I’m not sure that is true. While very verbose and convoluted writing isn’t easily understood, very condensed writing isn’t easily understood either and I’d argue that shorter writing is much more misunderstandable. The feedback I received from this course was that I needed to be concise because that is what readers want. I actually feel that this is quite bad if you consider your writing as art. The writing I’ve done in this course has been writing that I usually didn’t want to be concise, so by making it concise, I always felt like I was ruining my work.
During WP1, I felt that the meaning in my piece came from much more than just the facts communicated, but rather from the actual writing itself. I liked how unconcise and strange it was to read, as that is largely what I was trying to communicate. The piece itself was about having difficulty knowing the truth about things and being comfortable with not knowing, so it didn’t make sense for me to clearly communicate something that I wanted to be obscured. There is also the effect that convoluted writing makes it harder to understand and thus the reader needs to work more to actually understand it. My WP1 was not meant to be very accessible. When I received feedback, I was disheartened that much of it was just about concision even though I made the conscious decision to obscure the meaning. In my posts, I also received feedback that I was being too verbose. For the sake of my grade, I tried to make my writing more concise for WP2 and WP3. Most of the verbosity in my writing comes from wanting to explain my idea to its fullest capacity and to not leave things assumed. For my WP2, I didn’t really need to be verbose as I wasn’t required to explain anything as there wasn’t any real idea to the piece. For my WP3, I again found it difficult to not explain things that I wanted to explain. Ideas related to other ideas that I felt needed explanation, yet I tried my best to leave out much of the explanation.
Though my feedback was always to make my writing more concise, it never really felt right. After thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that I like not having the meaning of my writing to be too obvious. I don’t like spoon feeding my ideas to the reader in the simplest way possible, and I wouldn’t like it if someone wrote as simply as possible just to make their work as easy to read as possible. There is some idea that writing is meant to serve the reader, and thus the writer should be subservient to them, but the art I’m interested in making isn’t about serving. My writing is a lot more of an invitation that if the reader doesn’t want to read it, then can just stop reading. If they want to continue reading, they can continue reading. I don’t like the idea that I should try to influence the reader to want to continue reading. This isn’t a perspective that I only have on writing as I see it all the time in game design where the opinions of the player is the driving force of design. While there isn’t anything wrong with serving the reader or the player, this course taught me that it just isn’t something I’m interested in.
