mike.tomasello@gmail.com
I’m continually dissatisfied by what I write.
Part of the ‘English Language’ education—during my tender GCSE years, say 3 years ago—revolved around three paradigms of writing known as inform, explain, and describe.
We’d often be given assignments during class to, given a paradigm, write something that ticked all the necessary boxes. I judged myself as one the class equipped with some degree of skill, and thus I enjoyed and excelled at these exercises.
I remember one particular lesson where our teacher was giving feedback. For each paradigm she selected the class-member who was best at it.
I remember my hope that name would be one of them.
I remember my disappointment when I was one of them.
I was the one skilled at informing.
Damned forever to a ghetto of technical manuals and cooking recipes.
Hadn’t I aspired to something greater than that? To art? I was ungrateful. I didn’t feel appreciated by my efforts, just marginalised and insulted. Why should Ranvere be the one good at describing? He hadn’t an interesting thought or idea in his life! I’m special, dammit! I’m much more wide-read than he is, much less conventional and conformist. I have that je ne sais quoi!
Pick me!
There are people in the world with stubborn and sensitive-enough egos such that criticism galvanises them to improve. I’m not sure I was one of these people—generally I assume that I know better than the person dishing out the criticism—but in this case I was incited to action: I poured my heart into every writing effort after that. To a certain extent this yielded fruits: in the mock GCSE examinations, I came one mark away from achieving perfection—100%.
Nevertheless, I remained dissatisfied. Everything of merit that I wrote didn’t feel like my own—striking metaphors taken from song lyrics; weird plots from trashy sci-fi novels; even character names from T.V.
I went through a long stage convinced I had no creativity.
It was with some excitement, then, when I entered the world of A-Level English to find the inform, explain, and describe paradigm had vanished. We graduated to writing essays, not creative writing.
Analysis. This was supposed to be my forte.
As is typical, things didn’t go to plan. My disillusionment with education had reached an apex; my motivation was shot to peices. No longer challenged by my descriptive impotence, my drive and spirit left the building without bothering to close the door on the way out.
I went through those two years scraping Bs or Cs in those essays that I handed in (a statistic which can’t have reached more than a third). I was roused from gumption slumber enough that my final coursework and exam were pushed to dizzying heights, keeping my ego satisfied and shielding me from my two-year exercise in apathy that otherwise would have damned me to not getting the grades required to get into university.
Not that it helped. I failed math, and with it I lost Bristol.
I have an urge to write a lot these days, but it still doesn’t manifest. Everything that I write dissatisfies me. It’s dry, it’s clumsy, it’s uninteresting, it doesn’t flow.
I’m aware that this is some terrible feed-back loop—while I’m not writing I can’t possibly improve. I have motivation problems enough as it is without trying to convince myself of some practice-makes-perfect mantra in my mind.
Whatever this essay was about is lost to me now. Drive and direction have fled to the hills once more. Impatience rears its ugly head. I’m publishing this, unpolished, uninteresting, and unfinished.