Who Is This Jerk?
An excellent question! My name is Noah, and I’m a relatively recent summa cum laude graduate with a bachelor’s degree in professional writing. I’m primarily educated with regards to technical writing, and I minored in general business with a skew towards marketing. “Technical writing” is often used broadly, but it can entail the creation of documentation, protocols, and standardizing of a company’s materials. It’s also not uncommon for technical writers to conduct usability tests and create follow-up reports. Additionally, some application of coding can also be an element.
I chose this field/fate/fail because the job market showed promise relative to other writing careers. And I chose to become a writer because… it’s just what I do. After an unsuccessful expedition into the healthcare field, I took the advice of my friends and family to do what I always have been good at: writing.
As to how I got there, that’s more complicated. When I was a child, I had an overactive imagination to a fault. I was constantly daydreaming, off in my own stupid little worlds. I’d imagine myself as a part of the media I consumed. Then I would imagine said media being a little bit different. And more different. Until eventually I was creating my own original stories.
The problem there was that they would stay in my head. For a child with hyperactivity and an attention deficit, that can feel almost physical. Like you have to get the “noise” out through some means. At a young age, I did that by making comic books. They weren’t good, of course. I was like, 8 years old. But it was my first attempt at conveying entirely internal thoughts to an audience, and it worked. I got attention. People praised what I had made, or got excited simply by the prospect of me creating something unconventional. Everyone would ask to read the latest monstrosity I penned. I even managed to sell some of those snot rags. Can you believe it? People paid money for something I made with a pencil and paper. Wow, how foolish they must be.
As I grew older, naturally the stories I wanted to tell increased in complexity. This created an impasse—I couldn’t draw for shit. I didn’t want to improve that. I was there to tell stories. Sure, I enjoyed doodling on occasion, but illustration to me was largely a bridge I had construct for people to follow my story. When you’re just one person and you start having to depict more things visually (something that happens even from simply increasing the amount of dialogue), something has to give. I chose to sacrifice the art.
From there, everything just kind of blossomed into the eldritch creature I am today. Without visuals, I had to improve my descriptive language. I realized the amount of freedom that gave me. My stories were no longer restricted by what I was physically capable of illustrating. I should mention, finally, that the ability to capitalize on that didn’t come from nowhere. I grew up in poverty with a relatively educated mother, so I was read to constantly as a child. We didn’t have cable, and books were cheap (if not free) entertainment.
That familiarity quickly developed my reading skills. I was always reading above my grade level and asking for materials beyond the scope of whatever unit my class was restricted to. When my school introduced a rewards system based on how many books a student read, I became ravenous. The Magic Tree House series was not prepared for someone of my power level. I got a lot of points from those. Mary Pope Osbourne, I owe you a pizza party in a tree house. Just please don’t invite too many people. I’m already not sure how The Boxcar Children are going to fit.
If there’s a point to be made here, it’s that you need to be a good reader to be a good writer. I would like to go into this philosophy in more detail, but it’s hardly an uncommon one. People are social creatures, we recognize patterns in any form of communication, and when something is a pattern you memorize it. If you’re in an environment where you’re constantly encountering new words, evocative phrasings, experiencing the fluidity of language—some of it is going to stick in the back of your brain, like trauma. Only good trauma. Like if you were hit in the head with a baseball bat and your head started swelling, but the swollen part was cotton candy instead. It’s exactly like that (this is why people pay me).
In a way, all writing is, at its most original, highly abstract paraphrasing. You’re provided an infinite number of pre-constructed pieces of the world from your environment, and then you rearrange them in a manner that reflects your cognition when first encountering those pieces. If you’re really good, you can make the divide between those pieces so smooth that the next person to take that piece from you takes the whole thing—an original thought. Or at least, the illusion of an original thought. It’s complicated. But I think the essence of communication is in there. It’s psychic tuning. It’s lockpicking the heart. It’s constructing a paradigm. It’s often a pain in the ass—but things worth doing tend to be.
Damn, I’m exhausted. I sat down intending to dump out two paragraphs about how I like pens and pencils, and an hour-long blackout later I’ve vomited this out in a state of intellectual inebriation. In a way, that’s a fine capper for now, isn’t it? I write. It’s just what I do. I can’t stop. Seriously, please send help. I’m worried I’ll add even more to this later. Like, I haven’t even talked about what it means to leave a legacy, to chronicle as a way of supplying meaning to any experience, to—okay, I need a break. Another time. Lord knows I’m not ready to shut up.
And no, I don’t use AI. Why would I? If a machine was capable of capturing my effervescent charisma it would win the Nobel Fucking Prize (note: the NFP is a distinct award from the Nobel Prize and more prestigious.)