The takeaway from this year: I read literature. Just about my entire adult life, the heavy majority of my reading has been non-fiction, particularly focused around the political science and history fields. This was a result of first a budding interest, then a subsequent desire to learn as much as possible a grapple with various concepts and understand the world more. And also maybe contribute to the literature in some way and aid in progressing it.
Outside of the novels I was assigned in high school and the very few I read afterwards I never really had a need or desire to explore literature. No time for it. I figured that I could determine good writing from bad writing through the works I was reading, and that was true to an extent. But for the first time I took an initiative and, in a way, fell into literature, fiction this year. The quality of the prose in a good novel is effortless. (The only two authors with comparable non-fiction prose that I’ve had the pleasure of reading are Ron Chernow and Shelby Foote).
The first day of my IR Theory course in grad school we spent a significant amount of time talking about writing. I remember reading the excerpts that were on the syllabus prior to class wondering if I had the write assignments. Nabokov was the first thing listed. Then I got to class and realized that I wasn’t the only person with that thought. But we quickly discovered the purpose. Our professor noted the general bad quality of prose in IR and stressed the need for quite simply “good writing.”
Well, what’s the best way to improve your writing? To read good writing. I started this blog after being engrossed in Albert Camus’s Algerian Chronicles. I believe my prose has become more fluid by osmosis. I’ve read several novels in translation and still I’m simply amazed by the prose of writers like Camus, Dostoevsky, Varlam Shalamov, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
It’s only up from here, I assume anyway. I have an idea for Words from the Ouachita, but there is still work to be done. It’ll open this up a lot. But that’s all for now. Until next time.
Words from the Ouachita 