Seven Things the Internet* Thinks About Confessional Writing on the Internet

1. “Increasingly, the process of novelisation goes hand in hand with a strait-jacketing of the material’s expressive potential. One gets so weary watching authors’ sensations and thoughts get novelized, set into the concrete of fiction, that perhaps it is best to avoid the novel as a medium of expression.”

2. ”I always feel like I’m lying when I write poems. Whatever idea I want to translate gets distorted by my attempts to compare it with my already-vague understanding of what poetry is and why people write it, so I don’t think I’m ever fully present. For a few years blogging felt like the most direct route to externalizing thoughts–the only things I compared blog posts to were my own ideas of what I’d like to read.” 

3. ”Confessional writing […] can provide a unique opportunity to reflect on selfhood and identity creation. But sloppy writing is a refusal of hope; it denies the day-by-day comfort of narrative; it breaks the promise of coherence. It consigns us to the same numbing mundanity that we already experience too often in the actual unfolding of events, refusing us the tools to elevate them.” 

4. “STOP WRITING ABOUT EVERYTHING YOU SEE”

5. ”Unregulated honesty is painted as juvenile tendency, as if with age comes the gift of selective concealment — to succeed in any serious literary endeavour, one must develop a cold distance even from the most intimate events of our lives. This necessity to step back from experience mirrors a valued coldness in human interactions; feel little, remain private, do not speak openly of the ugliness in one’s life.”

6. ”And finally, from reading his articles, besides his intelligence, what I had really admired about his writing was essentially this feeling of how he seemed to uphold human dignity and the sacredness of human feeling and connection.”

7. “In an age of avatars and digitally altered profile photos, endlessly falsified and therefore perfectible online personas, we are all invited to construct ourselves closer to what we dream of being than what we simply are.”

*One of these is not really from the internet. Luckily, on the internet it’s easy to lie.

Tags: the human condition