February 2019 | Am I a writer?
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JK ON WRITING
A note from the future: I wrote this in 2019, before I learned that JK Rowling was a TERF. I wouldn’t reference her writing at this point. But here’s what I wrote a few years ago:
Are you a writer? Do you feel comfortable calling yourself one? My career choices say I’m a writer. I love writing. Writing comes naturally to me. Does that make me a writer? Somewhere along the way, I constructed a mental image of a “real” writer (a loner, imagination brimming with stories, living a quiet, undisturbed life in a rural place, forgetting to eat, so deeply does she live in her stories, writing longhand or clacking at a typewriter), and I don’t fit that image. It’s taken me a while to embrace the writer title, even though I’ve been writing professionally for years now.
A reader, yes. That’s an easy title to embrace. A writer? To be a writer, I must be a creator—if not a builder of worlds undiscovered and unexplored, then at least a creator of new sentences, ideas, sounds, stories. A creator must do, must make, is not simply a consumer.
I’ve been considering lately the stereotype that artists MUST create. To be a true artist, must your art take over your life? Is it the only thing? Do my ephemeral kitchen creations—built of flour, water, sugar, eggs, butter—count? Or my paintings? Do those make me an artist even though I don’t share them with the world? What about poems scrawled hastily in notebooks another eye never sees? What does it mean to be a writer, an artist, a creator?
JK Rowling says that to be a writer, I should: read (check), be disciplined (small check), have resilience and humility (maybe?), courage (a little bit), and independence (check). I am a creator, yes. A consumer, yes. One who imagines what could be and what might have been. And a writer, yes.
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FILL THAT BOOKSHELF
If you’re a UX writer, content strategist, or content designer, add these books to your professional library.
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HISTORY IS HISTORY
More students are attending college, but fewer are studying history. As STEM degrees gain in popularity, liberal arts degrees are declining, with history degrees dropping faster than any other.
Except. (There’s always an exception.) At elite schools, where what you study is not what opens doors so much as where you studied, history departments are growing.
My parents told me to study what I loved in undergrad and specialize later. In hindsight it would have been wise to minor in business, but otherwise, it was pretty sound advice. I learned a ton because I studied subjects I found interesting, not things I thought were going to set me up for an amazing career. Naively, I thought I could study whatever I wanted and then get an amazing job paying me oodles right out of undergrad. Ah, to be 18 again. I ended up specializing later to kick-start the career I wanted, but what a privilege to study art and philosophy, environmental law and the physics of musical sound without the burden of a future career sitting on my shoulders.
Now that tweens design and write apps that earn them millions, teens cultivate Instagram and YouTube followings that command five, six, and seven-figure deals, it’s no wonder parents encourage their kids to specialize, and specialize young. What are we losing, though, when all we look for is a lucrative future? Do we miss learning how to think, how to be? Do we get the opportunity to learn who we are? (Yes.)
What does big tech know about you?
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TECH BRAIN
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AURAL AGGRESSION
I am what you might call a delicate flower. Loud noises distract. Visual stimuli distract. And don’t even get me started about the pain of hearing a song I don’t like.
(Exception: while cooking. People could be throwing knives next to me while listening to EDM, and I probably wouldn’t notice. It’s my calm place.)
So yes, if there are commercials playing, I mute them because dang are they loud—the ultimate distraction. Now I know why: It’s not that the commercial is played at a louder volume; it’s that a commercial’s dynamic range is not so dynamic. It’s compressed, concentrated at the loud end of the musical spectrum, which my delicate-flower ears read as LOUD. And newer songs are being engineered that way too. Guess I’d better start listening to the Eagles.