The recent books I've been reading feel clinical, emotionless, and utterly robotic—as if the humans who wrote them have never experienced the power of humanity, of emotions and feelings. It seems like they have never experienced what it is to feel joy, grief, or anger.
Instead, there's a rigidity to literature nowadays, as if writing is a chore. Not a passion project, not a career, but something to finish within a deadline. Except that literature is not meant to be this way.
Creative freedom exists. There is no limit to what you can write. There is a vastness, a literal abyss for literature. No rules, no instructions. You live by your own ideas, your own designs.
Schools have a habit of teaching young learners that vocabulary matters most in composition. You need to expand your vocabulary. Use big and complex words. Words that other people need to Google just to understand the meaning. Use big and complex words for simple things because people need to know that you have an impeccable vocabulary.
Except that is not it.
Literature is a form of art.
To be a writer, you need to have creative literacy.
It does not mean you can't have a good vocabulary; you just need a balance. People confuse sophistry with an impeccable vocabulary. You can sound sophisticated and impressive to other people and still sound humane.
As a human, you need to be able to show your humane factors in your writing. You need to be able to show your flaws, your emotions. You need to be able to express and articulate if you want to sound humane. That is the literal definition of creative literacy.
I read a few pages of a book that a middle-schooler wrote; kudos to her, it's a big feat. However, using complex words for the most basic of things frustrates me. I know how to write formally, too. But we are humans. Humans have emotions. Being overly formal strips away the layer of emotion, the humane factor.
To be a writer is to have the ability to relate to your audience.
Show resonance, show humility.
When we read books, we want to feel a connection, a bond between ourselves and the characters, and perhaps the author too. We want to feel the emotions they are feeling, feel the grief, the pain, the joy, whatever it may be; we want that bridge of attachment and correlation. We crave that.
A perfectly structured sentence is stripped of its layer of humanity, scrubbed of all flaws. When the grammatical structure and the writing format are strictly formal, it starts to feel stuffy and pretentious at one point, because it feels like your point is to show off your expanded vocabulary. It feels like you have built a wall between us; you let us listen to a certain extent, but you never let it get personal.
There's no intimacy, no shared warmth.
It feels like we're intruders in a story we had no right to know about.
