hello. i'm a huge fan of your work. you're one of a kind- so much so you've even inspired me to take a shot at writing. to that end, i was wondering how you even got into writing in the first place. moreover, i'm constantly awed by not only your eloquence but also your expansive and astute ability to analyse works of art. so, i'm not sure if this is a stupid question to ask, but how does one go about becoming this proficient at analysis & expression? thank you, & i hope you have a wonderful day.
hello,, thank you so much. i'm passionate about my writing & what i derive from art, so i try my best to understand how i write and my process of thinking as a reader so i can excavate elements of it, refine it... all to say i'm extremely glad i was able to inspire you ; but i honestly (to the point of being self-effacing) discover more things i can improve on & more room for me to grow every day. i've been writing since i was a child, as far back as i can remember? i remember a small short story i'd written at age six, about a group of siblings, i can't date further than that.... um. but it was bad. a lot of my writing, when i go back to it, is bad... i think the parts of my writing i'm proud of now are just.. simply aspects of my style that have developed only because ive "kept to it"? there's really nothing that's particularly startlingly original, most of it is just a product of reading better writers & examining how they write, how they interest me. & watching and thinking about people, about strangers. i am not naturally attentive, i have to force myself to think, just as i have to force myself to write. since you'd also asked about analysis/expression: it's difficult, for me, to consider analysis as akin to deciphering something static, a meaning inherent in the text. i find a lot of my thoughts are: relation of one thing to countless other things, to the history & the context it's written in, to the context i as a reader am locating it in (all necessarily plural & derivative). what other stories & storyforms is the work conversing with? on the other hand: i'm also deeply interested by, umm, technique as a facet of a work's deliberateness. this seems to place itself against my instinctive aversion to decipherability, but the *how* of something being put across & inflicted upon the reader is something i try to interrogate in conversation with my own endeavours as an artist, & isn't really indicative of a piece of art's "whole", outside it granting context to what the text tries to do. not to say it's unproductive to look for meaning a text doesn't aspire to or consider? but i feel like routine everywhere mapping of "what" to analyse drains the text's moving parts into formula. i think criticism, if any, and more derivative thought should be levied less at moving parts and more at the Wholeness of the work... i'm not sure if i make sense? regardless: on articulation, i've struggled with it a lot & merely putting my thoughts together can be very yielding: translating what's in my head to words, talking it over with other people, etc — concretise & generate many a thought. i think it's more about: curiosity about the ideas you as an individual are provoked by, why you're provoked by them, the way others try to reach you & tell you things, than any innate pre-existing skill. at least this is what i've found valuable.
