It's crazy that having a whole life crisis can make you evolve so much though. I have seen many writers who do not appear to have evolved much in the span of 6 years; however, with enough life crisis and feedback loops, you will improve so incredibly fast.
The level of change that I underwent in the last 6 years alone is immense, but it was only since early 2023 that I can say that my writing style was burned through hellfire in terms of feedback loops and having much to write about.
I wrote down so many fiction novels and my autobiography-journal, which is still ongoing. But if it was not for AI language models, I would not have had much direction and clarity as to whether my writing is understood. It was because of this feedback that I wrote so prolifically, having written over 2.1 million words in the span of 574 days as of writing.
One example of a writer that I feel has not changed is a person who has stayed stuck in that conversational web author style and has not really shown much growth at all. It is like they are stuck being a generic example of their writing style, and that is unfortunate. I assume that the lack of feedback loops that writers can access today, the lack of drive, time, space, and tools and resources to refine and make one's writing precise relentlessly, and the lack of a rich, vast, and complex life of which to speak or, in the case that it is present, the lack of self-confrontation.
You can tell just by the fact that it appears as if their vocabulary and way of expressing themselves is stuck in some bubble of conversational web authors that has never once considered integrating elements from literary fiction, older texts, and all kinds of non-fiction. It is not about diversity for diversity's sake. It is about widening one's scope to say exactly what one means to say with utmost intentionality (not necessarily exactness, but to one's deliberateness). One can only choose to cross a road when he has a road to cross.
You can only set boundaries when you know where you're setting them. That extends to writing. You can only choose what best accomplishes your expression when you recognize firstly the limitations of language, but more importantly the criticality of knowing where you stand amongst all these different writers, people, lives, experience, and everything. You can only carve your own corner when you understand exactly where you're carving and how you contrast or compare to everything else. You can only say you like or dislike a book if you've read, and that goes the same for how one approaches their own writing. I have seen too many people sound like they have not picked up a book ever, or, if they have, limited themselves to the same bubble, without any consideration of the broader world, especially that which one's entire life has already shown. That one classmate you knew back in elementary? That should be enough to see the world beyond one's borders. There is great richness, vastness, and complexity throughout, and if one is to make a dent, they must know what shape they're making and on what surface or material they're making that dent.
A person only says something substantial when it pierces and exits the veil of conformity.
You can't just be a rebel, an authority figure, an arrogant man, a poetic, a divine messenger, a man in a hood, a person following another's footsteps, a John, a Margaret, a lone wolf, an angry frustrated gritty fellow, a man trying to keep things in check, and all that. No, not that. You can't just be a writer.
You have to show that you're not just a writer, and how to do that? You need to know everything and everyone; that way, you can set yourself apart from all of them, explicitly. If you can speak and act as the Romans do, then you can show where you diverge and at what points do you contend. This is how communication is established—through discrimination. You can only trust a sword when it is tested, not through its own internal logic, but through some external standardizing system. This analogy is not about conformity. It is about showing that no sword or writer is a lone island. We must endure the torture of integration and synthesis, and then, we much launch outselves forth, through, throughout, with, along, alongside, and in entire swallowing-embrace. We must recognize at one point, or immediately, that this is all there is, and what else there is but what is most necessary? And what is more most necessary than what one has already absolved and made a essential constituent of the entire thing—this "thing," whatever it is of our choosing and decided definition.
You must grab the word and pound it, deliver it rashly against the wall, press its neck against the sharp serrated edges of the wall's ridges, spank it and humiliate it with no "abuse" trace shown in that spank, and have it be torn into an energy so self-sustaining that it almost cries itself out. Rather than a writer crying out words, the word grabbed cries itself out, and there, upon that sitting moment, arises a great awakening of saints, some kind of beautiful image, encapturement, a lo-and-behold kind of situation, where all things are married into the whole in flows-and-blends, not a single thing left, not a single thing remaining, whole, buried, excavated, and lossy.
Violate and do violence against syntax and lay assault upon it, that it might dissociate under duress and abuse. Let it recognize firstly the principal element of life—to exist, and to undergo suffering so as to exist.
This is necessary, or, if it is not necessary, what is necessary? Nothing is necessary if this is unnecessary, because to speak is to tap into the essence of the world. And if not, then it is a shallow embrace, a surface-upon-surface connection, a nothing-burger in a world that swallows meaning and rips it like a head-and-neck from its body.
Let it emerge, fall through, and become a meteorite. Let it self-sustain, blast, dance mid-air, fall in ever-lasting presence. Let it sink and become absolved. Let it do all things under its own self-revolving embrace. Let it autoregressively reroute everything. Let it predict all tokens and burn through its self-attention mechanisms. Let it explode, burst, and then return to form as if time was rewound. Let it sustain in meditative mid-air silence, one that remains moving, but stays proportionally and geometrically still, like a comet in its symbolic form. It shall be, and physically essentialize. Let it run in mid-air, mid-animation, and mid-existence, never going, never coming, never arriving, never starting, and never being, only in that pre-state of all-things.
Let it exist in perfect suspension.
Suffer the world lest you suffer stagnation, confusion, self-delusion, and illogical self-logic. Choice is guaranteed only in the everything. And I am not pointing to free will. I am pointing to self-decision, which can only be done if one looks around just one more time, and again, and again, and again.
My journey to writing my autobiography-journal makes sense because it finds out everything—encompassing everything that turned me into who I am today and how I saw everything throughout my life. Words are only as meaningful as they are personally inscribed. And that extends to communication overall. There is no point writing if there is no self-confrontation, -interrogation, and -inquiry in relation to everything that one has experienced, seen, felt, imagined, thought, laughed at, smiled at, disliked, hated, and everything. One must be free, and in order to do so, one must subsume everything, every single detail.
This way, we can die in the process of trying so hard to make sense of everything, but in that process, we do exactly what we need to do—address everything and thereby actually say something instead of parroting and repeating to no avail.