It’s somewhat shocking to me to see the way I’ve changed as I’ve aged. One thing that recently struck me is the way I write. I wandered onto another person’s blog and this person fancied himself a writer. Every sentence had a level of pomposity that even the word pomposity doesn’t even express. By that, I mean his writing was excessively flowery. I thought, geez, I used to write like that.
I have no idea why I used to do it or why I stopped. I must assume, like with many things as I got older, the question became, “Who am I trying to impress, here?” The answer most every time was, it doesn’t matter.
But, I could still write like that if I wanted to. But when I read stuff like that after writing, it sounds overdone. If you can’t get the point across in normal language, advanced vocabulary isn’t going to help you. Maybe it’s because I now write much more factual content and less fiction. Fiction is a place where descriptive, verbose, and picturesque language should be used – to transport the reader. When you are writing instructions, you don’t want to transport the reader anywhere. You want to get shit done.
Ah, romance. That fleeting, etheric sensation that compels a man to remove himself from his left-brained, analytical prison and dash madly to the fountain of life. To drink deeply of the youth and vigor that had previously been tucked away in the recesses of his being, like a book scorned and discarded as too childish and fantastical for the adult he wished to be. Unhand that child, villain!
That’s how it reads to me. A bunch of independent words that each strike an emotional note and end up as a cacophonic disaster. Sure, some people do it better than others, and some even do it worse than that contrived mish-mash I spit up.
And the reason I wrote this is because I found an old archive disk with documents – old documents – on it and I’m deathly afraid to open them. On the other hand, maybe writing a story parodying that style would be good for me. The whole, “so bad, it’s good” could be something I excel at. I mean, what the hell, Fifty Shades of Grey exists, right?
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