The Writing Practice in the Days of Screens

I’ve always loved writing, and judge me if you must, but it was after reading my dad’s copy of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rising and Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles that made me want to be a writer. When I first went to college, I was trying to study journalism, much like Hemingway, and I copied his style for many Oregon-inspired outdoor short stories. Writers were so cool.

Yes, you can judge me some more, but the Beats were a massive inspiration to me. Writing about struggling with drugs and depression, and hearing music in everyday life where ‘normies’ only heard noise, sucked me in. I realized that I could write poetry and didn’t need to get stuffy with meter or rhyme, but capture snippets of moments of feelings.

When I was young, being a writer was an honorable profession. It was the best profession that required studying everything, and my favorite pastime, reading. I wanted to grow up with a study stuffed with books and a comfy chair where I could sit and read book after book after spending the afternoon reading. 

My only dream is that someone out there, someone I didn’t know and never would hear from, would read something I wrote, publish it, and like it. I grew up with this as my dream, and it isn’t even that lofty of a goal, but things, mostly me, have gotten in the way of realizing that dream.

Now I have wasted all these years and have found myself in a place where I can fulfill my dreams. I live in a society of non-readers. Don’t get me wrong, people read, but they read short-form online content. Most rely on audio media like audiobooks and podcasts for information, shifting the art form of writing toward an oral-based form of communication.

Someone told me we are retreating from a literate society to an oral one. Oral society means information is shared orally and remembered when essential. Sometimes it is performed to convey information, as in a dramatic play. 

A literate society allows knowledge to extend beyond our memories. The written word also allows for more abstract and complex expertise to be ascertained, whereas the oral is much simpler. The written word, when written well, can be more enduring than relying on memory or our elders.

And our society is both. We rely heavily on storytelling and experience, while knowledge is also written in books and on the World Wide Web. While more verbal modes of communication encourage presence and emotional depth and are more participatory when between two or more people, some oral media have a wall between the speaker and the listener; literacy encourages detachment, objectivity, and analytical distance. 

Some would even call the digital media we consume “secondary orality,” and it is bringing our society closer to an oral society. Digital media relies on repetition to get caught in the cogs of our memories, much like advertising. In fact, the line between a normal person’s social media post and an advertisement is beyond blurred. Secondary orality creates personalities, and those personalities become much larger than the information they transmit. Charisma will shadow those with real knowledge. 

In literacy, knowledge comes from written evidence, carefully argued claims supported by citations and documentation from reliable sources. At the same time, oral delivery relies on charisma, repetition, emotional persuasion, and social standing. On top of that, writing has a long memory that is archived, and we can cross-reference writings to get a clearer picture of what happened, which helps us build more complex knowledge across generations. But with oral media, it is what is immediate, memorable, and socially meaningful now. Knowledge is too nuanced to be replaced by short-term, emotionally charged narratives.

I’m not going to spend this whole essay bemoaning the threats posed by the Internet, but it does give me existential dread about my love of reading and writing. Take this blog, for example: I only have a few readers. I have readers who read everything I put out, and I love them. I have the readers I’m lucky to have when I post something I’ve written on social media, and maybe they are interested in what I might have to say about a specific subject. Still, there are a lot of people who don’t read anything I write despite their fondness for me, and I have to shrug and know that not everyone is a reader. I am lucky to have the number of readers I have.

And it isn’t just that I don’t have many readers on my blog; it is what I have been writing there. Aside from the stuff about going through cancer and my Infinite Fool Tarot, I have been relying on humor to bring in readers with my Cracked Pot Meditations, which were written in 2016. Now I am editing them, illustrating them, and re-releasing them, but truth be told, this wasn’t what I wanted to write.

As I said, I fell in love with Hemingway and the Beats. I loved the soul-crushing feeling of being alive in the written word. I wanted to capture those moments when we are walking down the road with a lump in our throats, because nothing makes sense, and maybe we fucked everything up. I wanted to write about the insignificance of standing in an old-growth fir forest, with moss under our feet. I wanted to write existential horror prose.

I also thought I’d still be writing poetry. I had so many notebooks filled with poetry and prose, but somehow I got insecure about writing in public. I even feel insecure about doodling. Now, when I write, I’m writing these introspections about my real life, and I didn’t really want to do that. No matter how many people think I could write a good memoir, it isn’t fun for me. 

I used to get so much pleasure out of writing stories and poetry. I would walk around Portland, post up somewhere, drink coffee, and write. I didn’t care what I wrote; I was figuring stuff out. I didn’t need a perfect workspace with several hours of uninterrupted work time. I’m not sure if it was the privilege of youth to smoke cigarettes and write doom poetry, but I don’t do that anymore, and I miss it.

A lot of it comes with the fact that the older I get, the more expensive it gets to stay alive. I work more than 40 hours a week so I can have shelter and food. I have gotten sick, so I have to see a doctor at least twice a year. This all saps me of strength and energy, and when I have time, I end up resting longer and longer, wanting to get out of my head more and more. Now, instead of just reading and writing willy-nilly, I am trying to numb my brain with TV. The more stressful it is to earn my ability to live, the more rest I need. I can’t just go from work to creativity at the drop of a hat; I need rest first. I can’t even afford to smoke cigarettes anymore, financially or physically.

Because most people are exhausted like me, they don’t wanna read. It is too focused. TV and the doomscrolling on social media help shut the brain off. I don’t drink or do drugs, so this is the only way I am numbing myself. I still escape through reading, and before I did a drug or take a drink, reading was my favorite form of escape, but now it isn’t enough to escape; I want to numb myself. I don’t even like prestige TV; I like to veg out to murder procedural shows like CSI or NCIS. Dumb, predictable, and, most importantly, mind-numbing.

The unfortunate side effect of mind-numbing TV, and TV in general (this includes any video consumption, so fuck off, YouTube afficiendo), is that a numb mind is not a creative mind. The lazy rest that helps me recover from the stress of my job is also stripping me of my creative forces. Not only saps me of the energy to create, but it blocks the brain from the imagination that used to be so wild for me. 

I have had friends who ditch the computers and smartphones in hopes of sparking the creative juices and blocking out the million points of data that are slammed at us, making it difficult to see the point of any of this at all. I struggle with wanting the world in my hand and harking back to the days of boredom – the Great Creativity Igniter. 

I miss being bored, but for some reason, I fear it so much. When we are bored, we are with ourselves, and not all of us are fans of ourselves. That boredom and creative self-pity were so inspiring, though. The writing worked out this alienating feeling I have always felt. Writing is what helped me come to terms with grief, my depression, my anger and rage, my agnosticism. The writing helped me see the causes and conditions so that I can become a better person. Lack of boredom, or at least the distractless kind, is what keeps me from diving all the way in with myself.

It’s not that I’m not writing; I don’t feel it the way I used to. I still need to put pen to paper and fingers to keys, but it isn’t wracking my soul like it used to. Nowadays, I struggle with it. I get frustrated that it isn’t perfect and throw away so much writing. I’m getting lost in the details. I write a sentence, then tear it apart; I don’t just write it all out and then edit. When I try distraction-free writing apps, all I can think about is how many mistakes I’ll find when I edit it. I start looking at my phone and wonder if there is something I should be looking at instead. I think I’m going to look up a word, but then suddenly, 5 minutes go by of scrolling through Instagram. 

I miss putting heart-wrenching moments on paper. I used to sing my sadness into my notebooks, and no one would ever see them; it wasn’t for anyone but me and the process. I grew up, and that singing stopped happening. I started thinking I had to become a brand. No one wants art anymore, just artistic marketing. Like the musicians people worship for their perceived personalities more than the actual music, I started fading into the modern discourse and becoming a brand. A brand doesn’t have a soul.

Yes, these are all just empty excuses, and I just need to knock my depression to the side and suck it up and just create stuff. We can be whatever we want, right? It’s half true: you can do whatever you want, but you have to be okay with the consequences. Creating beauty that no one wants doesn’t pay the bills if the creation itself is what feeds the soul. So it has to be a hobby that one does just a few hours a week, if I’m lucky.

Is that enough to be satisfied? It’ll have to be, but no. I hate how much my work life takes from me, from when I wake up, what and how I eat my meals on days I work, to my weekend being about resting, and how much of my soul it steals. Before you tell me to quit my job and start being a full-time artist, I need to remind you that when you are older and have health issues, it is so expensive to stay alive. I’m getting to the age where you start to think about money after you retire, and since I didn’t take life all that seriously for a long time, for I didn’t even want to be here at all, I now don’t have a lot to help me in my golden years, and the way the world is going, what is there to enjoy? 

I don’t like doing a whole essay on how stuff sucks with no somewhat hopeful conclusion, but I need to return to a more creative practice that sustains me. I know that, if you are a friend of mine, I am always struggling with this concept. I run into so many roadblocks between me and the life I want to lead, and I keep working to be an advocate for my time and space. I need to rest and create.

I need to return to a time when it doesn’t matter whether anyone reads my writing. Fewer people read now. I have to accept some harsh realities of my current placement on the timeline of human evolution. I need to remember that when I started writing, it was for me and not for anyone else or to be a brand. I am not selling myself, and if I have to sell myself to succeed, it’s not worth succeeding.

I’ll continue the reworking of the Cracked Pot Meditations on this blog. I will continue the Infinite Fool Tarot and the Superstitious Agnostic Substacks, but I need to get back into what I love to write, the soul screaming in pain.