Writing Style-lessness

November 18, 2006

I have been reading my blog entries from the past months and I came to this conclusion: I need to change my writing style. Or since I don’t have some writing style as compared to my friends who write impeccably, I think it’s time for me to get a new, decent one.

Writing has always been something that I do because it is fun. I have always liked using words because words give me that wonderful feeling of infinity— endless possibilities of who or what I am not, of who or what I am truly are and of who or what I like to become.
With words and writing them, I can unshackle the many (hideous) things inside my brain which if left undisturbed might cause the breaking of my sanity.

When I was pretty young (and I am not saying that I am THAT old), I never run out of things to write. Give me a sloppy Saturday morning and I can fill an entire issue of a magazine. I write about practically everything: the things that I paint, my yaya, my scented stationeries, my childhood crush, my piano, the programs I watch on television, my happiness, my boredom and many other things some of which were illegal for a ten year old.

Nobody read what I wrote of course. They were not something I was proud to show-off because first, I write badly, grammar and coherence included, and second because I thought (and think until now) that nobody cared (and cares) of the things that I wrote (and write). I kept them under this life-sized Sto. Niño standing in the living room with each piece of paper folded in my coded signature fold. That changed when I reached fifth grade when my teacher asked me to join a news writing contest and bagged a top spot.

And so I started reading materials that would hone my writing. I asked my mom to subscribe The Inquirer everyday and my aunt to buy me the most recent edition of Reader’s Digest regularly. Then Asiaweek became an addiction, and Nancy Drew series and Youngblood cut-outs and cheap paper-back pocketbooks and those pornographic Sidney Sheldons.

Then I would join essay writing contests at school and bring home cheap chocolate candies for a price but damn I was happy writing. Then I joined the school paper and wrote crap which everyone found to be amusing and so I wrote more crap. And now blogging, twenty-one years old and still writes crap.

That, ladies and gentlemen has to change as soon as possible. Because one, I am not some awkward teenager anymore and I have to “sound” old and wise befitting my age. Two, I have finished all my language courses in college so there is no way for me to learn to write “effectively” other than disciplining myself to write sensibly and not ostensibly. Three, things have to change, or at least start to grow.

But looking at the way I wrote this entry, I guess I still have a long way to go, brother.