Chem Check 2023
a meta but kinda boring analysis of Swimming Pool Thoughts
Every four hours(ish) you go check the chemicals in the swimming pool.
Of course, I’ve worked in places where I was responsible for tiptoeing through puddles of who-knows-what, sticking tubes into vats of Chlorine, holding my breath in a back room and thinking that expecting employees to do this with their bare hands was probably somehow illegal. I’ve also worked at places where you submit the readings on an app and it’s magically adjusted through some unseen control room, and at no point in the process would even the most dramatic lifeguard (me) fear for her life.
Sometimes, the chlorine is a little low or the pH is a little high so you make a slight adjustment to keep everything stable. Sometimes the chlorine has been off the charts for days but there’s nothing you can do. Either way, periodic chem checks give you information about what’s in the water.
Today is the one-year anniversary of Swimming Pool Thoughts, so I thought it was time for a metaphorical chem check. I started this Substack last December as a way to collect my writing while also keeping a small enough audience that I’d be comfortable to just be myself, have fun, and make mistakes. Writing—just like any other art form—isn’t a gift you either have or don’t have, it’s an ability that you develop through practice. And I needed to practice, without trying to impress anyone, to get a sense of myself as a writer.
A year later, I’ve written 20 posts here—averaging about two posts a month (except for November). I’ve learned and grown a lot as a writer, but this week I sat down to do a more thorough assessment of the pieces themselves.
Genre
For this analysis, I focused on 13 of the 20 posts on Swimming Pool Thoughts that I felt best exemplified my style and ideas.
I categorized five of these as primarily personal pieces, where the primary motivation in writing was unpacking and expressing some of my own experiences (“Kirkwood Highway,” “february 20-25,” “Cheer Captains, Sexy Babies, and Monsters on the Bleachers,” “I forgot the sky was so big,” and “I need to know where the squirrels go”).
The next four are opinion pieces (“Let's Not Grab a Meal,” “do you even live, bro?,” “Do You Guys Ever Think About Childbirth?,” and “Magazine Christmas”) that analyze cultural artifacts or phenomena to make a statement on ~society~.
The other four I consider creative pieces (“2037,” “I am the thing that floats,” “on the beach with Jesus,” and “To the Woman who Loved Me”) that describe imagined situations and there’s not a “thesis” statement driving the piece.
The tagline for Swimming Pool Thoughts is “place-based writing, thoughts about faith, & whatever else comes to me in the water.” Although this isn’t incorrect, it’s a description I had to come up with before I’d written a single post. A year later I’m not sure it accurately reflects the three genres I’ve used most frequently.
Linguistic Analysis
For linguistic analysis, I divided these into two categories: opinion/nonfiction, and creative/personal.
For the six opinion/nonfiction pieces,1 the median word count was 1658.5. The website I pasted these samples into determined they’re around a 10th grade reading level. Lexical density for the opinion/nonfiction pieces was 50.58% but I’m still figuring out what that actually means.
What’s interesting is that the seven creative/personal pieces2 are noticeably different— median word count of 1044 and average word count of 1163.7, with a grade level somewhere between 8.11 and 8.42. Lexical density was calculated as 48.41%.
I had the website find the most common words across the 13 samples and then I made a word cloud and… the eighth grade reading level makes sense. I use words like life, want, know, enough, little, love, living, world, being, time, people. These are some of the simplest words we have.
On one hand, this exercise has inspired me to be more intentional when I use the words on this list. Maybe I need to stop using “something” and just say what I mean sometimes. The word cloud shows me where I have room for improvement—I think writing is more effective and interesting when the author is specific, rather than just lazily reaching for words like “big” or “little” or “people” or “want.”
But at the same time, I’m proud to write from a voice that’s anchored on people and years and water and city and sky. On the things we love and want and know. Swimming Pool Thoughts might be an early highschool reading level, but it’s an adult perspective in an elementary schooler’s world.
Angsty-ness?
A couple months ago someone pointed out that most of Swimming Pool Thoughts tended towards being angsty and complaining. And they were right— of the 13 pieces I looked at, I’d only classify five as being positive. And three of those five have significant themes of loss and longing. It’s just most fun to be angsty on paper and optimistic in person!
But I’m a little defensive because even if I do a lot of complaining and criticizing, that’s never my final destination. My most negative pieces (probably “Magazine Christmas,” “Squirrels,” “Cheer Captains,” “do you even live, bro?”) end with freedom and peace and forgiveness. I think it’s important to say the angsty, critical things as long as the story doesn’t end there. Sometimes you have to stay awake all night to paint the sunrise.
Although I wouldn’t describe SPT as a world without shadows, it’s still dreamy, playful, hopeful. You can’t believe in the transcendent and not be existential sometimes. There’s angsty parts (and I do want to be more careful going forward not to overrepresent unnecessarily depressing themes) but ultimately I don’t see that as the core of this Substack.
Writing Timeline
3 pieces (23%) initiated within 1 week of publication
4 pieces (31%) initiated within a month of publication (all of my opinion pieces took about two weeks, but pull on things I’d been thinking about for much longer)
1 piece (8%) initiated several months before publication (“on the beach with Jesus” came to me over the summer but I just wasn’t able to write it until October. The way that my writing timeline was so different with this one makes me realize the writing process wasn’t really mine…)
5 pieces (38%) initiated 1-2 years before publication. Mostly ideas that I came up with for a class but needed to incubate for a while.
Overall/Random
Best pieces: “Let's Not Grab a Meal,” “Cheer Captains, Sexy Babies, and Monsters on the Bleachers,” and “on the beach with Jesus,”
Honorable mention: “do you even live, bro?” “Magazine Christmas,” and “I forgot the sky was so big”
Pieces that didn’t get a ton of views, but live rent-free in my mind: “Kirkwood Highway,” “2037,” and “To the Woman who Loved Me”
Pieces we can agree to forget: “you asked me what my favorite thing was about yale,” “Dying,” “23 Yale Myths,”and “Vaccine Theology”
The Delaware Trilogy: Kirkwood Highway (land), I forgot the sky was so big (sky), I am the thing that floats (water)
Things I wrote from the perspective of this year:
A house in New Haven
A squirrel
A dead girl in a swimming pool
Myself at age 36
The state of Delaware3
Almost every SPT somehow references at least three of these things:
Capitalism
motherhood (or femininity in general)
the gym
the sky
a body of water
death/loss
Freedom
sustainability/consumerism
driving a car
rejection of modern technology
description of the interior of a house with only one other person in it
Thanks so much for reading <33333
The six are “Kirkwood Highway,” “Let’s Not Grab a Meal,” “do you even live, bro?, “ “Cheer Captains, Sexy Babies, and Monsters on the Bleachers,” “Do You Guys Ever Think About Childbirth?,” and “Magazine Christmas.”
“Let’s Not Grab a Meal” is barely over 700 words since I pitched it to the YDN as an op-ed and “Kirkwood Highway” is 1114 words and really probably doesn’t belong in this category, but the remaining four pieces are in the 1500-2500 word range.
This includes february 20-25, 2037, I forgot the sky was so big, I am the thing that floats, on the beach with Jesus, I need to know where the squirrels go, and To the Woman who Loved Me.
This isn’t on SPT, it’s from my thesis lol