If you read to the end, right now, within my lifetime, ‘cos I can’t be doing this for all eternity, you’ll get these three consternations for the price of one:

• Oh, hey, I might get to write for a living;
• Recognising my flaws as a storyteller, and what I can do about ’em;
• Things you can expect on this blog soon…

Stare at screen.

Stare at screen.

Stare at screen.

Stare at screen…

Dear god.

If there was a better time to talk myself out of doing something stupid, it’s long since passed. Being ADHD and barrelling headstrong into a good idea is the mental equivalent of Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff into thin air. I feel like a kinetic, incandescent juggernaut – until gravity catches up.

So, you know those posts I made about jobhunting?

https://brologue.net/2024/04/25/stare-at-screen

And that post about liminality?

https://brologue.net/2024/06/14/the-liminal-is-the-means-by-which-all-is-revealed

I hope it’s apparent that there was some pretext to this – I have a job in cybersecurity already. What I really wanted to do, however, was to take the easy way out, and do something I’ve always been good at:

https://brologue.net/2024/05/05/writing-as-if-already-free

Stare at screen.

The application criteria stared back at me. They wanted a sample of prose? Easy peasy. But a critical essay on an English literature topic? I could probably spin that up before the deadline…

…Could I? It’d been years since I last did a proper critical essay, my application was last minute, and, look, I knew exceptions could be made for ‘outstanding writing ability,’ but how much is that weighed against your references? I’ve been privileged enough to make it this far as it is. And I wasn’t, for a second, going to start chanting, “I deserve this, I’ve already got this degree, don’t I, Mr. Universe:”

https://brologue.net/2024/05/31/yes-and-you-manifested-prime-cut-despite-the-fact-youre-obviously-spam

There also comes a point in time after you’ve left school that the editor in you starts to slack. I’ve caught him typing ‘right’ instead of ‘write’ more often. His grammar foundations are starting to creak, too; sometimes, whole words go missing from their sentences! What the hell is a paragraph?

But the biggest barrier, to me, was what’s exactly meant by being “critical” about an English literature topic. Some people like to think it’s just another word for being “balanced,” or “neutral.” I’m not the BBC, nor the Economist – I don’t think there’s such a thing as being objectively “balanced.” I find it far more honest to declare your biases at the start of a piece, and let the reader decide. On that basis, I didn’t want to shut up and write something that I didn’t believe.

Stare at screen.

Were these the right words? Were my citations enough? Were they even formatted correctly?

They had better be, I thought. They were damn good words, not to toot my own horn; LibreOffice is a bit finicky for Harvard-style references, but I got there in the end; they wouldn’t reject me for one missed italicization – maybe an employer might.

Oh, and they wanted my CV, too. And yes, of course I put that little invisible line at the top. It’s catnip for LLMs:

https://kai-greshake.de/posts/inject-my-pdf

And I told them so when I put ‘Art of the Job Application Rejection’ in my portfolio. Even if I didn’t, it’s the principle of having it. You may call it deceitful as much as you like. I prefer to call it a precaution, or a reminder to anyone who has a hammer and only sees nails: I’m a real screw.

It was a whirlwind of stopping and starting. I kept jumping back and forth between my essay, and making sure I was doing my application right like I was pure staccato. Did I do this? Did I do that? With four days until the deadline, I’d finished, and submitted it. Done. Dusted. Back to work.

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Stare at screen.

I got an unconditional to study creative writing at St. Andrews. I still don’t know if it’s due to an ‘exceptional writing ability,’ my referees, my previous education, or all three. Maybe being good at writing is thinking that every word you put on page (or screen) is vain, added-on drivel, deserving nothing less than unending ridicule at the Good Writers Tribunal™.

Maybe it’s trauma; I’ve an awful habit of getting stuck on simple statements with what I can only describe as the love-child of the Gish Gallop and infinite regress:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

Someone, somewhere, I tell myself, is going to tell me I need a hundred citations to establish a valid precedent for the statement, “I’m pretty sure that water is wet.”¹ How do I know if water’s wet? Was I there when wetness was invented? Why haven’t I considered these Top 10 Reasons Why Water is Actually Dry (#4 will SHOCK YOU!), backed up by these dubious studies and these outlets reporting on them?

It’s a creative writing degree – they were looking for a distinctive voice, and I should take an unconditional offer as evidence that I do have a voice. The only thing I ought to do is the next right thing, which is writing like I always have:

https://brologue.net/2023/12/27/death-and-work

(Oh, and putting the backlog on hold to focus on the reading list:

https://libguides.st-andrews.ac.uk/creativewriting)

Going in, I have more referees and connections to back up my writing than I ever did in four years of cybersecurity education, and one year on the job. I have a better hand of cards, and yet, I don’t like that a better hand bolstered my chances. It will never, ever feel right to me. Help by happenstance doesn’t come to all.

As I’ve said as much on the meritocratic cultural elements of fighting game communities: Behind anyone who’s “made it” lies a thousand stories from passionate souls who will not be heard:

https://brologue.net/2024/01/19/uh-oh-back-to-the-lab-again

The Twitter debate of ‘merit vs. luck’ in fighting games is a social experiment I do not want to be a part of². At its core, it is a false dichotomy and a red herring; it’s an anodyne cream for the rash of cognitive dissonance that ignores factors beyond the individual level by forcing us to pick one. It’s not unlike believing that weight has always been the only say in health that matters – a prim, neat just-so story, but patently bullshit:

https://brologue.net/2023/12/10/that-old-back-catalogue-part-ii-anti-diet-and-the-wellness-trap

https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/explore-health-rankings/county-health-rankings-model

I’m taking this opportunity, but do not, for a single second, assume me to believe I earned this through hard graft alone, and that’s the only virtue that matters, and that I’m satisfied. I got lucky.

All that being said, I want to make a few pledges to hold myself account to:

1. I Will Not Argue With My Peers (Unless There’s Good Reason To) (link)

Unless you’re repeating “common sense” myths without thinking – say, the Tragedy of the Commons or the myth of barter – I’m not here to argue. Nor do I want to start the sort of academic feuds that can go back and forth for decades – the ones that start with a little correction in one paper, followed by a passive-aggressive line in another, and so on.

I don’t mean to say I’m not interested in what other people think. It’s just that I would prefer to be a participant observer to how my peers have understood things. There’s going to be no better time for me to develop and sharpen my Anthro-Vision:

https://brologue.net/2024/02/24/t-h-i-n-g-s-and-stuff

I’m put in mind of a guy from one of my many web haunts. He’s got brains big enough to crush a car. He speaks in citations. I don’t know who he is, or what he’s studying, but when he’s not citing, he’s asking questions. They’re not always big questions – “Have you ever thought about what it’d be like to be a banana?” They don’t have to be. He knows how to ask questions and hear the answer. I should follow his example.

If I can do all of this, and continue to write as myself, and checking that I’m on the right track, I think I’ll do well.

2. I Will Not Stop Talking (To My Friends) (link)

COVID kicked my social life while it was already down, and my response was to act like a hermit to my friends, even though I mostly spoke to them online. This only got worse in my final year of studies, where I’d go whole weeks without saying a thing. It’s not a mistake I’m going to make again.

3. I Will Not Worry About Deadlines (link)

Deadlines are, like the elves from Discworld’s Lords and Ladies, terrific. They beget terror. They are to be dreaded every minute the gods send, and to hold them back, you need iron. Lots of iron. Now, iron for the body, you can get that in pill form, no problem; as for iron for the mind, clutch this David Graeber banger – it’s a piece of iron that can go anywhere, anytime, and anyplace:

“Most people who have ever existed have assumed that normal human patterns take the form of periodic intense bursts of energy, followed by relaxation, followed by slowly picking up again towards another intense bout. This is what farming is like, for instance… But even daily tasks, or projects such as building a house or preparing for a feast, tend to take roughly this form.”

In other words, the traditional student’s pattern of lackadaisical study leading up to intense cramming before exams and then slacking off again… is typical of how human beings have always tended to go about necessary tasks if no-one forces them to act otherwise. Some students may engage in cartoonishly exaggerated versions of this pattern. But good students figure out how to get the pace roughly right.

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs (Ch. 3: Why Do Those in Bullshit Jobs Regularly Report Themselves Unhappy? (On Spiritual Violence, Part 1))

At the same time – in Uni, never put off to tomorrow what can be done today. I’ve got a whole war chest at my fingertips here, and be assured, I’m going to use it before I step into my first lecture.

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I think I’m right to focus on writing as the next right thing, but not “as I always have.” For as much as the people around me think I’m a prolific scribe, I’m not the storyteller I could be. I’ve always navigated the world through the written word, and so naturally, I feel like dialogue is where my stories are strongest. My prose, meanwhile, is stiff, character actions written as though they occur with the jitteriness of abysmally dogshit stop-motion.

Describing spaces is an ingrown nail of a topic. When I close my eyes, there’s an occasional ethereal outline that might be an environment, but other than that, nothing. As I’m dyspraxic, I have a poor grasp of visual space, and can’t describe it beyond the basics unless there are references in front of me. At that point, I feel like I’m tracing.

It’s like this: When I try to focus on what characters are doing, it’s an extreme closeup; when I try to focus on where they’re going – moving the story along – it’s too far away, missing the details. I describe what catches my eye when I watch a show for the first time, but never come back to fill in the little things I missed.

In the coming posts, I intend to publish a short story exercise. Whether it demonstrates my doubts, or my overthinking them, its production was definitely emblematic of the Graeber quote from earlier. For writers, I feel like we hit periods where we might write a lot, but our tools begin to blunt, and we grow slack, maybe a little incurious; anxiety soon kicks in, and we frantically look for new things to try, like magnetic putty crawling towards a pole; then we go back to writing.

That, I think, is what “writing as I always have” should mean. The pen shall make me fret: I may write one word after the other; they may be good words on a bad day, and vice versa; I will be stressed, anxious, drained from other things that need my attention; it’s a fact of life. No matter how I’m feeling, I’ve just gotta keep writing, y’know? Like playing music, you can’t get writer’s block if you just keep going. Let it sound like shit.

To all my fellow offer-holders: let’s write some damn good stories.

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1. Q: “Are these people in the room with us right now?”
   A: No. They’re never anything more than shadows. ↩︎
2. This one’s a certified Razzle classic: If you feel a bit of FOMO coming on when everyone seems to be getting into [INSERT COOL NEW THING HERE], but you feel it’s a little suspect, call it a social experiment. Become a participant observer instead. ↩︎