im going on holidayy! heheheh guess where, hint- nanami

I took a creative writing class under Yiyun Li.  If you follow this Tumblr blog, you probably wish I would stop bragging about that.  A friend took the same class under someone else.  His main complaint was that, kind of like in a driving class, they immediately just expected us to “drive” without really explaining the mechanics of it.  It wasn’t taught like a science and, well, it’s not.  I think the best writing instructor I had was someone most people hadn’t heard of, someone who refused to even share HIS writing, because even though he didn’t have a bunch of published books (he was a TA) he still talked to a lot of the individual mechanics for an audience of people who were new at it.

I didn’t read a blog post about how to blog.  I just kind of did it.  I picked up some things by example, like where to put pictures and how to do formatting, and though I want to write to other bloggers I’ve noticed who employ good writing but very little formatting, it would be kind of misguided.  It’s subjective.

Writing is really, really important.  We joke that it’s the mark of a good engineer if your writing is terrible, but it’s not true.  And even if your writing IS terrible, it’s still a useful form of expression.  In writing, you can do what you want.  I started that last sentence with “and.”  I don’t have a consistent rule for paragraph breaks.  Some people would just call that bad writing.  I would call it something a little bit closer to stream of consciousness.  Ish.

Blogging is not that important.  I kind of wonder what modern day writing teachers would teach, if they taught blogging.  This would certainly make for a good blog post.  The reason for having a consistent topic has to do with potential followers SEO...there are really no other reasons for it.  Medium is dropping curation, so we may be able to stop following community guidelines in a desperate bid to manipulate the algorithm.  What I wrote would baffle even great writers from a generation or two ago.  You could teach literature, or you could teach “10 corgis that will make you go ‘awwh.’”

Here, the rules go out of the window.  It’s still dangerous.  I could write something completely wrong about Mr. Rogers having been a navy seal, and it might go viral.  Someone who posted that on Tumblr did.  I could write about a famous actor dying, and it might go viral before anyone checked Google.  I could write about the COVID-19 vaccine leading to swollen testicles.

And guess what?  Someone did.

But I think there’s some inherent value in giving everyone the opportunity to write and share.  Yeah, you’re going to get some pretty weird things about swollen testicles and such.  You’re also going to see some interesting manipulation.  You’ll find these really interesting accounts that seem to be complete and utter nonsense.  Actually, they might be geniuses.  They’ve unlocked the cheat code.  They know exactly how to say things, not to say something of substance or even to persuade but to get as much attention as possible.  And there will be a method to the madness.  They seem to know exactly what topics to write on, and how to drive as much controversy as possible.

Modern writing.  We could call it that.  Sentence fragment.