Crutch Week Day Five: Pretentiousness

As a writer, you can approach your work in one of two ways:

• You can expose yourself.

• You can hide yourself.

The majority of my work with new writers entails helping them to put themselves into their work. That doesn’t have to mean writing in the first person or exposing the darkest dark you can dredge up in your past. It only entails removing pretentiousness from your work. Ostentation is a wonderful crutch because it hides who you are, and Lord knows exposing yourself on the page is one of the hardest things to do.

This fear must be annihilated. You will spend many years doing so. It will keep reappearing like a bad habit for the rest of your life, but you’ll eventually learn to keep it to a minimum.

Your personality is one of the strongest tools you’ll ever have because we’re all different. We all have something unique to offer. When you hide behind pretention, you throw away your best asset: authenticity.

Ideally, you will transfer yourself to the page so effectively that people will be able to recognise your work without even seeing your byline. Even if you’re writing a distant piece about other people’s lives, faking it will bring a corrosive element to your work. Pretentiousness can reveal itself through:

• Unnatural sentence structure.

• Complicated words that don’t quite fit your text as well as simpler ones might have.

• Flourishes like archaic language. The word “for” instead of “because” is everyone’s favourite example.

Here’s an excellent example of pretentious writing.

The academics who built that engine noticed that some writers were using complicated words and references without saying a damned thing. Worse, they noticed that journals were publishing them, so they created an engine that would generate random text that sounded important but meant nothing.

They submitted their first result to a journal, which duly published it.

Some writers are full of shit. Sometimes we are the writers who are full of shit.