Writing | Hannah Pralle

[stef]

I have come to understand that most people don’t like to write. They only do so when required by school, work, or etiquette. When confronting a blank page, perhaps they feel the way I would, were I suddenly teleported into a rap battle, or was supposed to improv a jazz solo live onstage. For me, though, writing has always felt as natural, necessary, and pleasurable as breathing.

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[Abbotsbury]

Thank you. I was heartened to see another piece from you on the site. I've enjoyed them all. I feel similarly about writing; it's perhaps the greatest pleasure in my life.

[IlPrincipeBrutto]

I like writing too, although I'm nowhere near as imaginative as Hannah.
Unlike her, I would say that the introduction of modern writing instruments, and their endless options to mend a text, did not play in the same way for everyone.
Writing on paper requires planning, lots of thinking; the price to pay for a botched writing plan is that you have to start anew, hence you ponder long and hard, and organise your words well before letting the ink flow. It requires great mental discipline, it exercises foresight and the ability to abstract in great measure. The saying goes that if you write bad, you think bad, and that's easy to see why; because writing well demands good thinking ahead.
This has now changed with modern writing tools; yes, it's easier to follow your thoughts, to give even the dimmest spark of inspiration free rein on the electronic page. Let it run, chase after it as it gallops through the tickets and bushes of your imagination, safe in the knowledge that you will be able to keep the pace, as long as the plastic keys hold. Doing the same old-style, when the speed at which you can transfer ideas on paper is limited by the flow of a plastic pen tip, is much harder, and more frustrating; sometimes, you just miss those images, unable to capture them properly.
On the other hand, this also weakens the need to be mentally disciplined, to organise your thoughts, to develop them coherently first time round; you can always go back, which means you don't need to think to hard. You might even afford to just note down everything that comes to your mind, relegating the necessary selection of what is worth and what is not at a later stage. You can still produce writing of outstanding quality, you can still write well; but I think that the thinking behind those pages might not be as sharp as it used to be.
Although that's clearly not the case with Hannah.

IPB

[HannahP]

I def relate to all that! Creative endeavor, historically, has been so choked off, but also firmly curated, by gatekeepers. Now, even the gatekeepers of procedural inconvenience and inherent obstacularity are neutered and de-fanged! I'm glad, though. Glad to have spent years, decades, putting literal pen to literal paper, and also glad to be typing myself silly now.

So, here's my thought in response to your thought; and mine isn't really a countering thought...more of a re-frame. Or a de-frame haha. I have to set up an analogy first, though. I like to sing, and have given a lot of thought to singing and singers over the years. It's a whole deal, right. So obviously there's a just-about-infinite amount of work and practice and technique that can go into improving the singing voice, but what lay-people (as it were) often don't understand is that the only real difference between people who can sing and people who can't is not in the voice, it's in the ear. Hearing and replicating the intervals. And then almost equally, it's in the heart. Some of the best singers have really shitty singing voices, in a sense, but phenomenal ears and hearts. We all love them, and we call them things like Joe Cocker and Tom Waits.

Okay so now put a pin in that, but let me mention a different thing: the desire to write was boiling in my blood from a very young age, and I wrote things for school as required and entered little contests, but that was like...siphoning off part of Niagara Falls, at best. So people in my life received long letters from me, whether they wanted to or not, and I've alienated quite a few of them because they mistook the sheer volume of my offerings for an obligation, as if there was a tacit expectation that they reciprocate. Literally no one can do that; this is my cross to bear lol, I just always wanted someone to stand still and take it.

Anyway, all that aside, I did notice a VERY dramatic and I think important thing: some people are more fun to write to than others. I don't think it's an overstatement to say, some people are almost impossible to write letters to, and other people are almost impossible not to write letters to. I noticed it had nothing to do with their proximity in my life, or how well I supposedly knew them. Nothing to do with trust issues. It's like, idk, God made some people to get prose fire-hosed at them by me, and I don't know why.

As I got older and studied writing in earnest, I was genuinely confused by the concept of writer's block, as I mentioned in the essay, because I never write anything without secretly imagining it as a letter to someone, and imagining them being really amazed to read it. So if I'm having a tough time, then it's literally not my fault, I'm just imagining the wrong reader. Easy fix, but only because I've been blessed to encounter some thrilling hypothetical readers (little do they know, in some cases).

And here's what I found, and this is finally getting to my point, relative to your point — we don't have to work very hard at all to organize our thoughts when we talk to people who really get us, who really get IT, who really listen, who really like us and see that value in our perspectives. With those folks, we can just flow, and it all comes out brilliantly. There's something about presence. Like, I've never posted on SS in my life and had to set up an account and all that, but it was so fun to read your comment, and imagine you as the receiver of whatever I might want to comment — which in this case is feasible, but in general I have unshackled the necessity for any particular writing to be read by any particular reader, once I understood it's all just channeling! Straight up channeling.

It's so fascinating, really. Like, I was obligated to write my grandma letters, of course, and she just sucked to write to. Not because she was older, not because anything I could put my finger on, it was just a chore. (Sorry, Grandma.) If I had to write her today — she's dead now, thankfully — it would't matter if I had a stone tablet and chisel, a quill pen and parchment, a typewriter, a voice transcriber, a neural implant, a trans galactic hyper-attenuation device — it would be a chore, and no amount of "organizing my thoughts" would move the needle. But, a nice thoughtful comment on the forum? Boom, I'm doing this instead of what I'm supposed to be doing right now :)

Back to the singing voice vs ear thing, I think what makes stuff good is generally *way* more upstream of the visibly manifested...thing...than we realize. I "taught writing" — HEAVY quotation marks there — for a bit at a university, and it's just silly. It's fkn silly. "Write a 3000 word essay on the absurdity of trying to say anything at all, to anyone, ever" lolollllll. All we can do is attempt to be, excellently, and then report on that at intervals, knowing it's mostly lost in translation. I hope that my contribution to the dialogue, if any, will be: "Just imagine a better reader!"

Thank you for reading me, and your comment, and your kindness, I appreciate it. Thanks most of all to Rip for giving me an additional volcano to throw my snow cones into!!!

I like writing too, although I'm nowhere near as imaginative as Hannah.
Unlike her, I would say that the introduction of modern writing instruments, and their endless options to mend a text, did not play in the same way for everyone.
Writing on paper requires planning, lots of thinking; the price to pay for a botched writing plan is that you have to start anew, hence you ponder long and hard, and organise your words well before letting the ink flow. It requires great mental discipline, it exercises foresight and the ability to abstract in great measure. The saying goes that if you write bad, you think bad, and that's easy to see why; because writing well demands good thinking ahead.
This has now changed with modern writing tools; yes, it's easier to follow your thoughts, to give even the dimmest spark of inspiration free rein on the electronic page. Let it run, chase after it as it gallops through the tickets and bushes of your imagination, safe in the knowledge that you will be able to keep the pace, as long as the plastic keys hold. Doing the same old-style, when the speed at which you can transfer ideas on paper is limited by the flow of a plastic pen tip, is much harder, and more frustrating; sometimes, you just miss those images, unable to capture them properly.
On the other hand, this also weakens the need to be mentally disciplined, to organise your thoughts, to develop them coherently first time round; you can always go back, which means you don't need to think to hard. You might even afford to just note down everything that comes to your mind, relegating the necessary selection of what is worth and what is not at a later stage. You can still produce writing of outstanding quality, you can still write well; but I think that the thinking behind those pages might not be as sharp as it used to be.
Although that's clearly not the case with Hannah.

IPB

[HannahP]

Thank you! Yes, same. Writing is decadent; the pinnacle of self-indulgence

[aapowell]

You should definitely do a substack. In addition to SS of course.
Your snow cones reply comment was just as good and entertaining as your article.

[HannahP]

I'd considered a substack, forgot all about it, then encountered your comment, and will consider it a nudge from universe...