Language Games and Jungle Writing

On breaking writing rules and tuning your voice

Among other insights, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is famous for his idea of language games, which played¹ a large role in his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations. While I do not claim to be an expert (or even well-versed intermediate) of his at times obscure writing, Wittgenstein argued that the use of language and the meanings of words are always context-dependent. A conversation, a story, an essay, in his view, are distinct games we engage in and we tacitly agree on the rules of these games.

I hope that no philosophers reading this have suffered a heart attack yet. I'm just getting started.

According to every writing guidebook, part of the non-fiction essay game is to be clear. Avoid ambiguity, don’t experiment with structure or syntax, and keep the wordplay to a minimum. Your essay should take the reader on a guided tour through the neatly manicured garden of an idea cut down to size. And for the love of all the writing muses, don’t hedge. No ‘probably’, or ‘might’, or ‘could’, or ‘likely’. You want to make your claim, the walled garden of your essay, as unassailable as it can be.

I’m half-decent at that and when I write professionally, I keep those tactics (because that’s what they are) in mind.

The problem? My brain is a jungle, not a garden. The ambiguity is the point.

If you’ve read other posts by me, you’ll have noticed that I flout certain writing rules. Like lianas that wrap around trees, I signal uncertainties and biases where and when I’m aware of them. I use parentheses to add random thoughts and play around with footnotes that might jump in unexpected directions. That is terrible for essays that aim to convince the reader — forgive me, muses, for I have sinned. But convincing you is not what I’m trying to do here. No, I am inviting you into the jungle and I want you to turn over leaf litter and find something new; a tiny sliver of an idea, wrapped in an exoskeleton of unexpected relatability, scuttling through the undergrowth.

If I let myself, my self, shine through in my writing, you might occasionally need a machete. A jungle has many connected layers, bathes in an ever-changing play of light and shadow, and bursts with biodiversity. But it’s not always easy to navigate and that makes the writing in which I am most true to myself 'unmarketable'. Following Wittgenstein, I use language as a playground for ideas and concepts. Ideally, I want my words to dance on the edges of their meanings and tiptoe into gray zones.

This brings me to that magical thing we call ‘voice’ in writing. Oh, what a coincidence, I wrote a guest post on voice in fiction for the SFWA a little while ago. As I wrote there:

Your voice as a writer is the collection of verbal quirks, (subconscious) stylistic preferences, and choice of metaphors that shape your words and sentences, a fingerprint written in cursive, as unique as you are.

Your writing voice is the configuration of your player avatar in the writing game. Just like in any game, you gain experience points through practice. Just like in any game, people have different levels of innate talent. And just like in any game, you can play to win, to attract attention, or for the sheer joy of playing.

Here we run into the problem of the jungle again. The laws of the jungle are often too obscure, too protean, too idiosyncratic to use as the rules for a multiplayer writing game². The question, then, is how much of the jungle should one burn down to build a garden where we can play? The instinctive response is, “None of it.” In a recently republished essay, the magnificent Ursula K. Le Guin writes:

See, the thing is, as a writer you are free. You are about the freest person that ever was. Your freedom is what you have bought with your solitude, your loneliness. You are in the country where you make up the rules, the laws.

This is a wonderful sentiment and one I try to incorporate in my life to the extent possible. Far be it for me to disagree with a literary giant like Le Guin.

But.

There has to be a but and this particular but hides in the ‘to the extent possible’ part of the sentence a bit earlier.

While making your own rules is a great rule (ha!) for writing in and of itself, that changes when you want to publish or share your writing, whether it’s physical, virtual, or in any combination thereof. If you have no intention at all of sharing your writing, you might as well stick to a journal or diary.

If, as Le Guin further suggests in her essay, you write to arrive at a deeper truth, sharing your writing involves the desire to share that truth, to see if it resonates with others. Hitting the publish or send button is the recognition that, even though the writing on its own is a solitary effort, its effects need not be. Sharing your writing is - in the best cases - also the recognition of other perspectives that may challenge and enrich your own³.

That requires at least some ground rules for a Wittgensteinian game. Some jungle trimming and voice tuning.

That doesn’t mean burning the jungle down wholesale, though. I could look at the most successful newsletters or essays and try to mimic what they do, build a garden in their image⁴. Sometimes, that sounds tempting. It’s not always easy to accept the slow growth of a newsletter when others seemingly firework into virtual success overnight. I also know that, on a personal level, mimicking a garden of known successes⁵ would cause the howls of the jungle to become too loud. However, I can’t simply splotch the jungle onto the virtual page either. Even though the ‘voice’ in my non-professional writing can already be *a lot*, it’s still, always a redacted version. It’s more of me than you’ll find in other places, but the sharpest edges and most restless wilderness remain in their bony cage. Here be dragons, weary travelers.

One of the greatest challenges for anyone who actually enjoys writing is finding the right balance between ‘self’ and ‘other’ and setting the minimal rules that allow a bridge to be built or a game to be played; to be your truest self to the extent possible, leaning, pushing, groaning against the hurricane of a world that tells you who you have to be, while still allowing room to reach for others (or for others to reach for you) with trembling fingers, hoping against all hope to catch a glimmer of a kindred spirit.

A path, perhaps, into the jungle.

Thanks for playing along.

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Something different: I have an essay on the science and fiction of dream hacking in this month’s issue of Clarkesword Magazine! Let me know if you’d be interested in seeing this type of thing in the newsletter. The jungle is teeming with ideas.

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1. Pun very much intended.

2. Am I messing around with metaphors here? Yes. Welcome to the outskirts of the jungle.

3. Or be inane troll chants, but that is the risk of sharing your writing, especially online.

4. AI-generated text would be a pixelated image of a garden. Twice removed from the jungle, stripped of its heartbeat, and repackaged for mass consumption.

5. Science fiction fans, you wonderful creatures, that book title reference is there just for you.