Writing should be simple and appropriate

I'm short on time again today, so I'll keep this note brief. (Though it still ended up over 1600 characters.)

On my history of writing.

I think the writing we do starts with imitating others.
In my case, I found a diary I kept for just three months when I was in fourth grade, and reading it, the style was almost identical to the diary that appears in Abiko-sensei's "Manga Michi".

After that, I was inspired by a friend who was unusually good at writing essays, and wanting to get better myself, I started reading the books and magazines that friend was reading.

Next, as is a path many people take, when I was in high school, I encountered Haruki Murakami, and I was heavily influenced by his urban writing style.

After encountering a style like the fragmented narrative in "Pinball, 1973", the words in my own brain became Murakami-esque. Naturally, my creative writing was also just like Haruki Murakami's. A significantly degraded version, of course. ...Good grief.

Speaking of being influenced, I worked part-time as a cram school instructor during college, and there was a strangely mature middle school girl I taught for a short period who left a strong impression on me.

She showed me a poem that had won an award at school, and it was excellent. Her mental imagery and the actual scenery were skillfully blended, and the structure was such that when you compared the first and last lines, the writer's feelings had lifted just a little bit. And above all, the writing style was beautiful.

I couldn't let myself be beaten by this. For some reason, I started competing with a middle schooler, and I began writing in earnest. All the while thinking that I, too, wanted to write something that could inspire others.

It's a memory from the past now, but I built a website and wrote hundreds of movie reviews, did some strange creative writing, and even attended a screenwriting school where I wrote scripts incessantly.

But looking back now, I realize those pieces were all self-indulgent. I would add adjectives that didn't fit the flow or use words that didn't match the situation. In a word, they were writing that makes the reader struggle.

If I were Haruki Murakami, even if a sentence appeared that didn't make sense, readers would wonder what it meant. But for the writing of someone nobody knows, no one is going to read into it deeply.

My wife courageously pointed this out to me: if a reader gets stuck, they won't want to read the rest of the text, regardless of whether the content is good or bad. It was a painful piece of advice that my writing tends to have that problem.

I had convinced myself that writing that made people feel a slight sense of discomfort was my own personal style, so when I received that feedback, I immediately pushed back. I thought that if I only edited in the direction of readability, I would end up with a personality-less style.

Wouldn't writing according to a manual cause the writer to lose their individuality? Even while thinking that, I figured I should first learn the basics and then build upon them. So, I read every book on writing I could get my hands on.

After reading various things, I arrived at this book: "The Book to Acquire Communicative Writing Skills".

It is a book that lectures, in an extremely simple tone, that the most important thing is to communicate to the other party. What you understand when you read this is the basic stance that to communicate, your words must be simple and used appropriately.

That said, there is a philosophy that people who write clumsy sentences don't look like smart people, and I liked that point.

For example, using verbs appropriately, such as "playing shogi" (shogi o sasu) or "playing go" (igo o utsu). Saying "doing shogi" or "doing go" is clumsy, you see.

Simple and appropriate.When I think about this keyword, Yuming's song lyrics come to mind. She once said something about wanting to weave lyrics with universal words that aren't caught up in the transience of the times, and I thought, 'I see.'

As for me, since I've become conscious of this keyword, I feel that I've been able to write business documents and these notes a little more easily.

Well, out of a habit from my youth, I still occasionally add strange modifiers, as always.