212 sats \ 3 replies \ @k00b 14 Oct 2023 \ on: Stacker Saloon
I need more writing tools that allow me to remove I from my writing. Writing with humility seems to require underscoring fallibility in the point of viewer.
"seems|feels [like]" can do some mileage but there has to be a bunch of other stuff out there.
I know what you're saying -- reading text full of "I" can be off-putting -- but something to consider is whether you're thinking about it at the right level of abstraction.
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You could try to reduce the 'I' by literally crafting the text so that it doesn't contain it, so there's like a textual reduction of first-person-ness
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You could try to write from a more general / universalist perspective, de-coupling whatever you're saying from personal contextual issues that don't matter
In my experience, a lot of people confuse #2, which is often worth doing, with #1 which is kind of dishonest -- you're still just as present in whatever you're writing about, you're just hiding it.
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This is nice framing. I find myself doing (1) more than (2). (2) can feel dishonest sometimes too. Like, who am I to speak for the universe? You can end up stretching the cone of your perspective wider than you deserve to.
personal contextual issues that don't matter
This is so tough but fair. The easiest stuff to write is personal.
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Buried in there is another generally unspoken thing: the contextual issues that don't matter are devilishly hard to identify. Sometimes the fact that it's your story is why people care, at all, about the story.
So now there's a dialectic between these assorted desires: to subsume the I, to tell the truth, to give of yourself. It's hard to know the right thing to do.
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