Thoughts on Experimenting with Form

The Portrait was completed fast. It had taken me about a day and a half of work in total and it was ready a month and a half before its publication date.

The first reaction was from a loved one: “I’m not sure if you should publish this.” That’s when I knew I had to. The question I was wrestling with: what would be the value? With a piece deliberately written to provoke an emotional reaction, the obvious thing was to ask the people familiar with the text to share their impressions so I could learn from them and get inspired. And inspiration started with the first reaction: asking me to reconsider publishing it meant that I couldn’t change the original anymore. Except, originally, it wasn’t called “A Portrait”. That came later.

Now, I’m not saying that I agreed with all of the impressions I had received. Most of them — both positive and negative — were simply a matter of taste and perspective. With that in mind, some feedback has the potential to provide extremely valuable insights, contributing to the evolution of the project itself. For example, to me, the most important observation came from a friend who told me that the piece was incredibly difficult to follow. That got me thinking…what if I chop the paragraphs into smaller sections? So I gave it a try and, after the first two paragraphs, it started to feel right, leading to the next challenge: the content stopped making sense. Those words somehow wouldn’t work in “poem” style. At least to me.

Inspired by the ending of the portrait, I figured that turning it into a verbal interaction would do the trick. The initial choice for the conversation partner was simply a journalist. But after reading the Dialogue from that perspective, I just couldn’t imagine any serious journalist sounding like that. Perhaps I should put “unemployed” in front? Sounded much better, indeed. Personally, I just imagined someone who got fired for bad journalism. This then opened up an opportunity to frame the ending a little differently with a single, small piece of information. Just playing and having fun with details without removing anything that was a little unpleasant for some in the portrait version. Speaking of, choosing the subtitle “A Dialogue” is what gave me the idea to add a subtitle for the original version.

After reading the final draft for the dialogue, two things became apparent: one, it seemed easier to follow along and, two, it sounded less brutal. Framing is magic. Apparently. So I went back to the loved one who felt a little insecure about the tone and to my friend who struggled with the structure of the portrait and I asked them again for their impressions. Both agreed, the dialogue’s structure was cleaner and it even became acceptable to be published — for the more sensitive person instead of the original.

While I deeply respect their insights, personally I was a little conflicted. Technically, the dialogue didn’t omit any of the harsh sounding language. In other words, I could’ve justified only publishing that version, making some people feel a little more comfortable — while making myself feel a little uncomfortable: I was too attached to the portrait version as I like its raw, unfiltered nature. And, because I was aware that by (ab)using the form, the new frame of the piece would still count as a form of censorship in this case.

So an opportunity came up when another friend needed some help with his PC. While I was completing his new Linux setup, he agreed to read both versions. Feedback was positive so I just told him that the dialogue would be the one that’s probably going to be published. He immediately asked why. “Why not publish both?” I felt understood. Someone other than myself pointed out the missing value I was looking for: making an additional statement about the importance of the form.

With all that being said, to me the real value was that, by the end, it wasn’t a solo project anymore with an aim to have fun and write something a little provocative. Instead, the shared human experience — absent from the content of the piece itself — was working behind the scenes, contributing to its final version(s).