Today was the first day back at my office after yet another leave due to health reasons.
I wrote a couple of blog posts (History of the Norwegian Exlibris, parts One, Two, Three, and Four) during my leave to keep my mind busy – and because writing is a creative activity which requires regular exercise, and I’m all for that.
After I handed in my doctoral dissertation in 2017, I was so burnt out and disillusioned that I wasn’t able to write anything for quite some time, and I felt like I had lost my writing voice completely. At that time, I was also constantly switching between three languages. With German as my mother tongue and my primary writing language, English as my developing academic language, and Norwegian as my day-to-day and workplace language. The year I handed in my dissertation and the following year had a couple of traumatic events in quick succession; I was left unable to write (or read, for that matter) anything remotely academic in German without intense anxiety. I switched to English; my main academic community had become Digital Humanities, and I was very active in the Nordic and Continental European DH scene, where papers and conferences tend to be in English. I also wrote blog posts and did some microblogging on Twitter. However, at work, first at the National Library of Norway, later at the University of Oslo Library, I almost exclusively talked and wrote in Norwegian; a language I had only recently learned and mainly used for day-to-day, colloquial communication. While I worked on improving my written (academic) Norwegian and became more comfortable writing academic English (especially in shorter text genres like blogs, abstracts, and presentations), I stopped using German altogether, aside from messaging with family and the occasional tweet.
My writing style – my voice, my tone – was all over the place: When I speak, I sound noticeably different between the languages I use. I observe a similar phenomenon when I write. However, I had a hard time keeping a consistent ‘voice’ in my texts; they didn’t really sound like ‘me’; I didn’t know who ‘I’ was, academically, personally, existentially, anyway.
I noticed that between my academic German dissertation and my academic English papers and presentations, I had changed my tone radically: from an impersonal, overly careful, stilted, and highly academic jargon in German to an informal, chatty, and excessively personal style in English, and with Norwegian lying somewhere in the middle, unrefined, flat and dull, neither formal nor informal.
For the past few years, I have written texts almost exclusively in English, but I often found it hard to start a piece of writing. Fear of the blank page, I believe, and a lingering anxiety.
Written Norwegian flows now, however, mainly for emails (there are lots of them) and in spoken word. German as a written language has sadly disappeared, and I now sound like someone who knows German syntax and grammar but lacks flow and struggles with phrases and idioms.
Last year, I made a serious effort to regain – or redevelop – my writing voice. I decided to write more regularly, using my many blogs as patient, digital paper. Just write. Just publish. It can always be refined later. With this approach, I combated my debilitating perfectionism and, to a degree, overcame my anxiety. It is ok; my texts are good enough, the stakes are not as high as they would be for an article or a paper, and whatever the quality of the final product, at least I get a training session out of it!
While I was on an extended leave for health reasons, I re-read “On Writing” by one of my favourite authors, Stephen King (yes, you read that right). King recommends that aspiring authors keep a rigorous, daily writing schedule – and to keep the writing sessions separate from the editing sessions. I’m not an aspiring fiction writer; my work encompasses so much more than writing. However, I believe King is right when he states that writing regularly will make you better at the craft.
That is why I like to write blog posts: they are small enough chunks to not take me a long time to create, they are published on my personal website (not a special interest or academic platform with an editorial board) or thematic blogs that I am responsible for, the readership is minuscule and there is no immediate feedback function: no judgement, no criticism. Which I would have on social media: I don’t get a dopamine rush or the post-rush drop, no hate comments, and no general comment section nastiness. I don’t even have any analytics engines on my website; I don’t know who visits my site, how many read my posts, or how long they stay. It’s like a one-way mirror where you get to look at me, but I don’t get to see you. And you know what? That’s alright.
Over the last year or so, through continuous writing and low-threshold publishing, I have regained confidence in my voice. So much so that I have concrete plans to write a book – a monograph – on a subject I find mesmerising, intriguing, and captivating. I want to write that book! I cannot wait! My fingers itch to get it out!
But since my writing has been almost exclusively in English for the past years, and the book I want to write is targeted at a broader Norwegian audience, I am in a pickle. I can write and achieve flow in English, but Norwegian is a different story. I read and understand it very well – but I still feel that telling a compelling story and using high-level language are too laborious and intimidating. At this point, I’m a bit unsure about how to tackle this obstacle. I have to make up my mind, kjenne etter, liksom.
For the time being, I will continue my writing exercises in English, here and elsewhere online. You are welcome to tag along!
