When I read “Genres as Crushers of Creativity” by Jude Berman, I was happy.

I hate categories, and to read someone else talking about how categories in the publishing industries crushes creativity, I was tempted to find a parking lot to dance naked in until I realized people might not appreciate that sight as much as I might enjoy doing it.

So judgemental, humans.

Maybe it’s because of my own identity not fitting neatly into someone else’s category, maybe it’s because I connect things differently than most people seem to. Maybe it’s just not enjoying the prejudices that come with categories.

“Oh, you’re a software engineer, will you fix my computer?”
“It can’t reproduce, it’s already fixed. Unless… well, we won’t discuss that.”

When it comes to blogging, as an example, I have been around 2 decades and I’m heading toward 3. I’ve written about a lot of things, some popular, some not. Douglas Adams once wrote that a nerd is someone who uses a phone to talk to other people about phones, and by that measure the Internet itself is nerdy. We use the Internet to… talk about the Internet.

Yet there’s much more to us. When the ‘blogging tips’ started coming out in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I rolled my eyes and just wrote about whatever I wanted to write about, writing in a niche be damned. We have tags for that stuff. I can write about topics that touch each other sensually or violently that way, and go about my business.

Did I make lots of money doing that? Nope. Not yet anyway. I suppose I would need a business plan of some sort, and that’s not in the cards right now as I keep writing unpublished books, waiting for this AI business to settle down. People find my stuff, they read it, they like it or not, and maybe their world is a little bit better for it. Someone liking or commenting on something that I wrote makes me smile, even if they disagree because it means it provoked thought. Negative emotions are running rampant around the planet, and those conversations are best to be avoided.

When we write – those of us that do beyond short missives to the ether of microblogging – we write to an audience. When I think of the writing that connected with me over the years, the scratching of pens on paper, the tapping of old typewriters, it was as if the author was opening worlds for me beyond time, beyond space, and even beyond death. To flatten the perspectives into simple categories seems silly to me.

Take for example the connection between Toni Morrison and Information Science I wrote about recently – she connected two things and made a very human point. That, to me, is what people who write do – they connect things in human ways, and in a period of technology we forget that. Technology is useless to us unless it empowers us and our ability to connect with other humans – nevermind the AI girlfriends, a disturbing trend if every I saw one.

We get to define the walls that contain who we are. Don’t write for categories. Write for yourself, be it a blog or a book. Or stay in a lane someone else defined for you and eventually wonder why you can’t break out.