The Depth of my Shallows

I’ve always fancied myself a deep thinker and in some respects maybe I am, but it doesn’t really show in my writing. I like to imagine that I could draw from a concept, or a book, video game, movie, etc. and distill deep and nuanced themes from them; I wanted to wring out profound ideas from the symbols and characters. There are people who are very good at this, people who make a living at it, critics of all backgrounds, and bloggers such as Bobduh and froggykun. They seem to be able to find something hidden and beautiful lurking beneath the surface of just about any story and reveal something heretofore unknown or enlightening. Fascinated, I have tried the same and mostly just failed at it. I'm much better at writing in circles chasing my own thoughts than actually examining anything. My critical reviews are frustratingly shallow, even if I concede that I'm not well-practiced at reviewing.

There is something immensely alluring about having a literary mind, about being able to zero in on the nuances of a story and emphatically proclaim that you have pierced through obfuscation to reveal a hidden truth. I have not cultivated a literary mind, however, as much as I might like to pretend. And I do pretend; that’s pretty much what every post on No Book Unread is. Pretending is okay though. You have to start somewhere. Despite all the ideas I have though, I am significantly less eloquent when I commit those ideas to writing. If I’m being honest with myself being profound in that 'everything has a deeper meaning' way isn't really me. Hell, maybe it could be someday but right now it’s just something that I like, and like reading from others. When it comes to writing I’m not deep, no matter what type of media I’m analyzing. Observant maybe, but not deep. There is only rarely a deeper meaning behind my words and ideas. My strengths rely on drawing connections, often to things that usually have no business being mentioned in the same sentence.

I’m not sure what I was thinking when I first decided I wanted to try my hand at critical or profound pieces. I’ve always hated analyzing literature and, albeit to a lesser extent, other media such as movies, animation, and video games. English 102 taught me that analyzing meant tearing a story into its individual component parts, dividing a story into pieces of symbolism, ‘significant actions’, and isolated lines of ‘meaningful’ dialogue. The thought always infuriated me. That’s how my English teachers always seemed to teach literary analysis, but in the recesses of my mind I’d be screaming, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts!” The hatred has faded over the years since I realized that analyzing doesn’t necessarily mean completely dissecting a story, but some residual hatred still lingers. Perhaps that is what prompted me to try my hand at being analytical and to attempt to read between the lines? I wanted to prove that you did not have to lay out the exhumed remains of a story in order to claim that you had divined its secrets. So much for that though, I haven’t proven anything in that respect. Maybe my teachers were right. Maybe you do have to know all the inner workings to truly understand something, or to analyze as it were. But I still think it's all too easy to lose sight of the whole when you are fixated on the components.  

I think part of the problem is that, for a while now, I’ve been trying to write in a way that seems to conflict with me on some level. Maybe I've lost my identity as a writer; my perception of myself as a writer has always been tenuous. I frequently feel that my words are not my own, that there is some disparity between what I want to say and what actually ends up on the page. It's as if the thoughts are my own but then written by a different person. What irks me the most is that I'm unsure if the problem stems from trying to emulate someone else's writing or from my (nearing a) decade-old expectations of style not matching with my current style, or something altogether different. This whole idea must seem kind of strange, but imagine that you wake up one day and your speech patterns have all changed. You say things you never used to, you speak with a different tone, and, why not, you have an accent. You'd feel out-of-sorts right?  Your idea of yourself would conflict with how your speech manifests. Language is one of our primary ways of interacting with the world, and one of the most prevalent. Your particular style of communication is part of who you are, and that includes written language. Now, it might not seem it but this is quite detrimental to depth of writing, and just insight in general. We all take for granted that much of communication is unconscious. We choose our words, our actions, and our expressions, but we don't have to think about the actual process of speaking or writing once we are fluent. We don't worry about how to form a sentence, we worry about how we present or arrange a sentence. Our speech patterns are a natural manifestation of our experiences and quirks and are unconscious. If you suddenly woke up speaking British English though it would be extremely distracting. (Assuming you are an American English speaker of course, if not just flip it.) Very likely you would fixate on what you're saying and find it hard to actually focus on your conversation topic. In the same vein I find my own writing very distracting at times. The goal for me then is to achieve some level of comfort, hopefully meeting halfway and partially adapting my writing to be a little more "me" while also becoming more accustomed to the things I can't easily change.
 
While I like writing as a whole it's been a while since I've really had fun with it. I know that writing doesn't always have to be fun, practice is rarely fun in the traditional sense, but even my recreational writing has been listless for a while now. It's hard to really invest yourself in chasing phantom themes and elusive symbolism when you aren't having fun doing it. Over the past several months I've been spending my time trying to be critical and analytical, searching for depths that may not even exist in many works. When I take in a story I don’t have a cloud of vague profound ideas swirling about my head just demanding to be crystallized into something more coherent. I lack the driving force of a good idea that needs to be expressed. None of my ideas demand to be written in the same un-ignorable nature that used to overtake me, I have to wrack my brains for a few good ideas and stitch together them together on paper. I don’t read a book or watch an anime (unless it’s Evangelion or FLCL) and wonder to myself, “What am I not getting here?” If a work has depth it needs to put effort into making me wonder what those depths are (Shutter Island for instance), otherwise chances are I won’t care. It's not in me to go looking for depth in every mundane aspect of a story, so I guess Hills Like White Elephants can just kiss my ass.

I am shallow, or at least I can be. I am often melancholy and jaded, and sometimes bitter, and frequently meandering because that’s how my thoughts are. Yet I have a tendency to overlook those traits, or at least downplay them. I still fall into the bad habit of assuming that my dominant traits are the same as they were a half-dozen years ago. My writing has changed though, and so have I. By nature I'm want to take the wide-view these days rather than fixate on the details. I am a little saddened by some of the changes. I'm more tired now and, as I said before, more jaded. In a nutshell I'm afflicted by a sense of cynicism and disillusionment in contrast to my younger idealist, passion-driven self. My shallowness is largely related to that contrast, for in the real world I have found no deeper meanings. There are hidden ideas, profound ideas, but they are drawn out through careful observation or deep empathy, and are hidden by ignorance more than anything else. My shallowness is a reflection of that. I do not go looking for deeper meanings, because the meanings are either there or they are not, whether personal or universal. Profundity or depth of story is needlessly associated with obfuscation and complexity, and I don't believe that solely true. Sometimes the most profound things are some of the most simple, but it's very easy to overlook the simple things. Maybe that's why I don't consider myself deep though. Whenever I look closer for something deep or complex all I find is something simple.