Lyrical Doughnuts or, the "I" in Writing

If you’ve ever been a graduate student in an English department, there’s a good chance you’ve had to teach Freshman Composition (comp, for short) or some level of a writing class for at least a semester, if not for your entire graduate career. It’s how many English departments still survive and how they justify their existence within most universities: students are required to obtain some measure of writing competence so that they might be able to write about and in the disciplines that, ah, you know, really matter.¹

When I first began teaching comp, I noticed a pattern: a student would struggle with, say, even a small research project like a review, leading me to believe that they might need a lot of extra help. But then they would get to an assignment like a personal narrative, something that requires a different voice, and would shine. It was as if the same student embodied two entirely different writers: one who wrote in sometimes beautiful and lyrical prose, the other who found it hard to even begin to express an abstract or analytical thought about a subject.

I think of this often as I fruitlessly scan the archives of Substack writers recommended to me as “great writing,” only to find a preponderance of work that is mostly about personal reflections and narratives. Even book or media reviews are couched in personal terms: “As I read this, it occurred to me..” or, “This made me think of my first experience with this author…” There are by now more than a half-dozen uses of “I” in this essay alone, so this may seem…ironic. My point is not that no one should be using “I” but that too many writers today, especially those hoping to make it as writahs—those imagined and imaginary creatures living in sunlit Brooklyn apartments with millions to spare from sumptuous advances—rely too much on personal experiences and responses to impel their writing. The “I” has become an easy way for writers to create work quickly, to pound out that Friday evening piece for subscribers. But it has become a dreadful bore, and created a corpus of work that relies on us supposedly connecting to a writer rather than actually learning or experiencing anything new in their writing: we are awash in a sea of “I,” an I-scape, if you will.

Some of this has to do with pedagogical traditions, especially in the United States. Americans are more likely to be encouraged to begin writing by crafting personal essays and students are often validated for revealing their inner selves: consider the pernicious rise of the college application letter, a genre that demands that anyone who wants a funded college degree first vomit out an essay detailing the many ways in which they are special and traumatised and will yet persevere to change the world. Social media, apparently the biggest career-definer these days (not really, but we think so), is little more than a large “I”-shaped cloud, engorged with private details from poop to sex and everything in between. There can and should, of course, be a balance between different kinds of writing, but the demands of publishing today don’t help: memoirs are supposedly big, for instance, and the average 18-to-35-year-old can net a decent advance with a promise of an explicit and salacious tell-all or at least with something that details traumas of all sorts. Consider that Lena Dunham got a $3.7 million advance on the strength of a proposal that consisted of several diary entries (if you’re an It Girl of the day, even the fact of having hosted a dinner is worth writing about).

The matter of the personal narrative and the ubiquitous “I” is especially complicated by race and gender: you can’t produce a narrative about your experience as, say, a migrant of any sort if it isn’t suffused with pain and trauma—your own, not anyone else’s. Only white experts can speak or write analytically about migration: everyone else must first and primarily demonstrate that they are broken and beaten subjects, only able to relay their stories. “I was born, and then I was abused, and here is my story” is the general drift.

Even without the pressures of performing the “I” as raced and gendered subjects, writers in general are increasingly compelled to use personal stories to draw in more readers. As the publishing world collapses, as magazines and websites disappear and the Big Five begin, slowly but surely, to collapse into The One, more people are turning to platforms like Substack in the hope that subscriptions might boost their incomes. Increasingly, more of them feel compelled to mine their personal experiences and even their traumas to lure eyeballs. It’s not uncommon for even the supposedly successful ones to parade their personal lives—on many occasions, it’s easy to see that traumas are being invented on the spot (the internet allows for endless reinvention and confabulation). Did you not care for my political views on race last week? Here’s a sad story about my mother, please stay and I promise to keep bleeding for you. Oh, wait, did I piss you off with my long and heavily researched article about data collection and the CIA? My dog died! Reading such writers, I’m often reminded of the students who would plead for extensions, but forget to keep track of which of their grandmothers had died.

Most of these same writers can’t write well or at all without the supporting structure of the “I” framework. Their media reviews are clumsy and their political analyses rarely go beyond vapid thoughts, with very little research but lots of opinions (if you’re not being paid to do the work by a paying magazine, why bother?). Their personal essays, though? Oh, those, ah, those are something else entirely: little gems sparkling in the light of attention from readers who ooh and aah about how beautiful they are. But they are, ultimately, little more than lyrical doughnuts, combining a surface beauty and rhythm with the sweetness of an indifferently made pastry. It’s lovely the first time, but you can’t have too many.

You can, of course, use the “I” successfully but only if it has a point to make (I invite you to read some of my own essays, such as this one, this one, this one and this one), but that takes time and craft. The problem for many writers is that the “I” is also too often attached to snark, and snark is where wit goes to die. Too many people mistake snark for wit—but wit, the genuine sort, is the result of sustained thought and often carries a point within a larger analysis: it is a rapier sliding in and poking a tiny but deadly hole in the heart. Snark is a blunt meat cleaver to the head, a party trick, an invitation to mock and deride that can wound but achieve little else. There are currently hundreds of writers adrift from the kinds of websites that taught them how to snark, who are now wondering how to write for an audience that’s not entirely defined by the quick economy of likes and retweets. How do you write when you’re not writing for instant validation?

Moreover, at some point, we’re all going to hit a saturation point: even the most, ah, inventive writers will run out of stories, with no lives to give (and someone, somewhere is always keeping track). The rest of us will move on to better and more satisfying writing. Doughnuts are great, but they can’t sustain you for too long.