How I write

It occurred to me a while ago that maybe I should say a couple of words about how I write ... not the mechanics, of course, but the style and the approach.

For the most part I don't think about it. I write these posts pretty much the way I write anything else. I have been told by some people that my written style is distinctive, and this actually worries me a bit. If anyone who knows me personally ever finds this blog by accident, I fear that it may be difficult for me to maintain my anonymity; I feel in this respect a little like the character Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, who does a piece of magic at one point when he is trying to stay hidden, and then says, "If there is any to see, then I at least am revealed to them. I have written Gandalf is here in signs that all can read from Rivendell to the mouths of Anduin."

But I don't know how to write differently -- or not significantly differently -- so I think I am stuck with this outcome.

There are, however, a couple of respects in which I write these posts differently than I would write anything else.

One is that I am less guarded in what I say. I don't mean simply that I talk about very personal things -- that is the point, after all. But I don't check myself the way I would in polite conversation. If the phrase that comes to mind as I write -- the phrase that truly captures what I mean -- is pungent or earthy, I don't strive to replace it with something anemic and inoffensive instead. After all, I figure, my grandmothers are both dead and nobody from our church will ever connect this with me. (I've never done any writing for our church.) So I don't have to worry about anybody being offended by my choice of words.

This feature of how I write these posts is especially visible in one particular instance, one that I find common enough it deserves mention by itself. This blog is about my marriage, and one of the features of married life is sex. Moreover, the blog is inter alia about how I try to deal with my wife's multiple infidelities, and those too (pretty obviously) involve sex. Now, the English language has lots and lots of phrases for describing sex: some are flowery, some are elegant, some are clinical, some are crude. The choice of which one you want to use depends on what atmosphere you want to convey, and also on who you want your reader to think that you are: if you want to sound refined, you use these terms; if you want to sound businesslike and direct, you use those ones.

Wading through all these terms -- through euphemisms piled on top of euphemisms, because one set of euphemisms becomes too common and therefore starts sounding crude so that it has to be replaced by another -- is a lot of work. And I decided early on in writing this blog that I wouldn't bother. At a fundamental level, they all mean the same thing, and I think it is therefore simpler to use the same word each time and let the context dictate what the mood or atmosphere is supposed to be. Therefore I made a deliberate choice to settle on the root word upon which all subsequent euphemisms and indirections and obfuscations have been piled. At least everybody will know what I mean.

The basic verb in English to refer to the act sometimes called "having sex" or "making love" is to fuck. Therefore you will find that all references to sex in this blog, when I need a verb or a participle, use some form of fuck or fucking. This is deliberately intended to avoid all the other complications through which I would otherwise have to wade. And, as I say, everybody will understand me.

I should add, if only as an afterthought, that one consequence of using fuck as a verb in this blog is that I will never use it as an interjection, nor as a piece of generic profanity. If I am trying to express exasperation or impatience or anger, there are lots of other words I can use. But any time that I use fuck it will be because I am trying to convey literal semantic content. I hope that mollifies anybody who finds himself perturbed about how very frequently I write it ...