Opening Self-Reflection As A Writer

Written By Matthew Shadbolt

I love to write. I love the moments which turn into hours as I lose myself in the joy of creating something. The moments where a thought turns into form. The moments of accomplishment when I hit publish, step back and realize what I’ve done. I write all day at work. Or rather, I type all day at work. Slack messages, emails, status updates and their offspring, I’m usually typing as I’m responding to someone else’s to-do list. I’m surrounded by writers in a busy newsroom at NBC News. I’m a people manager, so I often have to coach others on clarity, editing, and how to say the same thing for a stakeholder audience with a limited attention span. Brevity is something I lean hard into at work, but not something I indulge when I write for myself. I like to write for hours, but edit for days, so in an academic context, I’m proactive in addressing the assignment, but will sit ‘in’ the work for as long as I can. Refining it, moving things around, bringing in new thoughts, different thoughts, supporting thoughts.

My academic life at Penn over the past few years has afforded me some incredible opportunities to write. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in school, so the very idea of writing a paper with a deadline is something I remember well, but hadn’t tasted for decades. I’ve written many different kinds of things at Penn. Lengthy scholarly essays from inter-familial conflict in ancient Greece to the ethics of international aid in present-day Russia. I’ve written scripts and voiceovers, hundreds of comments and discussion responses, short stories and research papers. I’ve written letters to editors, punchlines to jokes, and even written correspondence with the clergy about the future of grief in the era of artificial intelligence. I greatly enjoy the challenge of academic writing, and the enormous sense of satisfaction in realizing that I can actually do it. Outside of class, I’ve written dozens of movie reviews for The Penn Moviegoer, which continues to be a labor of love as I enter my fourth year of doing so as part of the club’s board. In 2022 I won The Lilian and Benjamin Levy Award at Penn for one of my reviews. I’ve also started to write down the stories of my life for my daughter to read one day. The story of how I came to live in America. The survival story of overcoming cancer. The stories of work, loss and what has happened to me. I’m also fascinated by the writing made possible through generative tools.

So I have a very distinct schism in my writing. There’s what I do all day professionally. And what I think about all day and do before and after work. I don’t enjoy the kind of typing I do at work all day, but I am mandated to do it, even as I delegate more of it away from myself. I write in noise and chaos during the day, and the stillness and silence of home at night. Work writing is depletive, taking more than it gives. Academic and personal writing is literally life-giving and restorative. I ache for the opportunity to write all day, and I often do get to do that. My writing is often closely informed by my love of the movies. In a recent creative writing class, I wrote a consciously non-linear story inspired by my love of David Lynch and Jorge Luis Borges which wove in and out of fact and fiction, truth and invention. It was more a challenge of where to stop than where to start, and was something really more that ‘fell out of me’ rather than something I consciously mapped out and planned, which I rarely do anyway. It was such a joy to write, and offered a space of opportunity to keep going.

In reading, I read a lot. Mainly non-fiction, and almost exclusively recreationally. I have always been a reader, and I love those moments where I lose myself to a great book. I really enjoy biography and historical non-fiction, and I have a particular passion for books about the Zulu War. This year I’ve read a broad range of things. From Maggie Haberman’s wonderful biography of Donald Trump, to Everitt’s biography of Nero. Biographies of Nietzsche, Odysseus and Nick Cave have also been highlights. I finally read the epic Gilgamesh, but also spent time in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag and Defoe’s plague years. I often spend at least an hour reading every day. I’ve never been a fast reader, and there are often moments where I’ll reach the end of a page and realize that I’ve been thinking about something else the entire time my eyes have been skimming the words. But I do love those moments where reading accelerates. Those cold Sunday mornings in front of the fireplace where the pages just turn and turn before the rest of the family wakes up.

My challenge as a writer is an obvious one. I love it and I want to do more of it. Perhaps having a job which is sensitive and supportive of my need to step away and write is good enough. But the itch is stronger than that. Earlier this month I turned fifty. I don’t feel it at all. But what I do feel is a growing need to spend my time on things which I love, and less time on the things I don’t. The difference between what I have to do, and what I want to do. Reconciling these just about works at the moment, but I aspire to be able to write a lot more than I currently do, and my time at Penn has been an incredible catalyst for making that happen.

Matthew Shadbolt https://www.matthewshadbolt.com
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