on writing (#2)

In Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes, Emerson, Fretz and Shaw lay out the art of i) capturing experience in jottings, ii) converting jottings into consolidated notes, and then iii) creating, out of these notes, a patchwork of scenes and episodes, stitched together using threads of analysis. This is a laboured process: it requires taking apart, querying, rearranging, and then weaving observations back together, to offer fresh insights. Beyond documenting the world as it is, the ethnographer's task is interrogating it — and even, perhaps, writing into existence new possible worlds.

What I do here, as part of this newsletter, is not so complete of a process. Currently, I don't have the brain space to invest, or energy or time to expend, into anything except the beast of a thesis I am supposed to be writing as we speak. I am a perfectionist to a fault,

painfully self-conscious about my work, and prone to deleting and / or never finishing the things I in fact care most about. Thus, the pieces you read here are only quick snapshots of and interventions into my life, or social life. They are, deliberately, written as fluidly and without inhibition as possible: scratch notes as the bones, arranged and couched in flesh, but otherwise undressed / underdeveloped / untrained. 

I try to hit publish as soon as possible, before the doubt creeps in. 

I write a lot, and I always have: mostly (online) diaries, and since long before I encountered creative non-fiction as a genre. My favourite thing about creative non-fiction is that it doesn't really have rules or conventions. It's commentary on whatever subject matter you'd like, 

plus licence to experiment with structure, form, style. It's not as fussed about narrative or plot as fiction tends to be — it can be inconsistent, erratic, and withhold closure or resolution. It likes facts but it also enjoys speculation and reflection, so it borrows from and yet stretches beyond journalism or traditional non-fiction. It requires world-explaining more so than world-building — the latter demands more creativity than I can usually muster. It asks you to consider and feel, but it doesn't (necessarily) need you to persuade. It's decidedly non-committal, and leaves space for indulgence; in other words, it enables me to write intuitively, and do 

whatever the fuck I want. This is how I write best. 

I say creative non-fiction, but I suppose I'm referring specifically to the personal essay. By essay, I don't mean academic essays, though I like writing those too. No: I'm talking more about essays as per Montaigne, the French dude who wrote this book called Essais. Essai literally just means, in English, attempt, and so Essais is essentially a collection of Montaigne's attempts to make sense of various things that interested him. It figures, then, that there is something really laissez-faire about the personal essay, as a genre — free, experimental.

By the way, I only know this about Montaigne because of a creative writing course I took back in 2023, as a filler subject. Otherwise, I've never formally studied creative writing as a practice — unless you count the tuition classes my parents sent me to back when I was in primary school, in preparation for scholarship exams. Writing is a practice, though: a skill, a craft to be mastered. Too often, I forget that it isn’t just a talent that some folks are born with. Tending to words requires, first, tending to the wordsmith.

Academic essays, on the other hand, scratch a different kind of itch in my brain. I hope it's not insane to admit this, but I suppose it's like playing with dominos, or finishing a jigsaw,

or getting that last piece of the roof of a house of cards into place: managing to construct a seamless argument can be such a high. As much as I like to play with and occasionally warp structure, it's also fun to deploy words with precision; build a sharp TEEL paragraph; create something deliciously orderly. The goal is to use logic to crescendo, until you can mic drop,

This essay shows my wrinkly brain is huuuge, motherfucker!

My stipend is measley in the grand scheme of things, and yet — what a luxury it is, to be a full-time writer with a stable income. The reality is that I am exceedingly unlikely to have this opportunity, this period of my life, again,

day in, day out at my desk, thinking, composing, rethinking, shaping the narrative for just the right flow, tweaking sentence and paragraph structure for rhythm, scouring my vocabulary for the exact word with the exact connotation that I need. 

Of course, I'm romanticising it here for you, when it is often agony. A thesis, in particular, requires writing to meet the demands of an extremely small number of readers, who are extremely well-versed in your subject matter. It requires writing purposefully, around a through-line that must be clear, original in some way, compelling,

there is little room for ambiguity (and lord, I'm an indecisive bitch; I'd much rather leaving it all hanging). And my thesis, in particular, as ethnography — dancing between the messiness of my life in the public service as my research data, and the orderliness that is necessary for the analysis of this life to make sense —

demands a mongrel of writing styles that I must tame. I have nobody to blame for this except myself, for adding these complications; for wanting to produce something that is both artful and analytical; for deciding that I want to tell a story that must be acceptable under, but does not pander to, rigid conventions of scholarly writing.

P.S. I deployed my first simile in Year 1, at six years old. I'm so unabashedly proud of this, I've dug out a photo to share.

[Text: “Bugs Alive was scary in the spider section. The type of spider I hate most are redback spiders. Err! / We went back onto the bus. Another day was over. It was a great day. Butterflys have four wings, brachiosaurus necks are sooo long, as long as the trip. It was soooo exhausting. What a wonderful day!].