on writing

At the moment, I write for a living. Some fools pay me money to do that, which I, from time to time, find amusing and a bit scary. A thesis. In philosophy. It is faaaaar from ready. I have loads and loads of work to do and some things I haven't even started. Most of the time, I amble and ramble (did that rhyme? Yes it did.).
Lately, I've been thinking about style. About the aims & intentions I have in my writing (and thinking). How I get insecure about what these aims are - exactly. I am reading one of my texts to make revisions on it, slaughter the darlings, the trolls and other necessary things. Every now and again, I have a strange reaction to the text. I don't recognize the voice. There are chunks of texts so contorted by academic standards that I hardly recognize myself in them. Or, should I say: I see a misfired attempt to write Conventional Thesis.
It's a telling fact that the best bit in the text is a bullshit footnote about the crazy psychologist in Riget, Pigernes Ole. In that footnote I have managed to write something I can live with, stylistically. The rest of the text - full of formal expressions, abstractions and petty excuses. Many expressions show that I am simply not too sure what I want to say. "In a certain sense..." In WHAT god damn sense? And is that even English? I DON'T KNOW!! But the writingmachine keeps writing it.
I don't know where those expressions I churn out almost mechanically even come from. Do they inhabit a planet of their own, attacking my writing from there? Extraterrestrial terrorists? Perhaps. Possibly.
"A focal point of critique"....what? Do I have to write like that? I don't fucking want to. It's bad. It's fluff. I hate fluff. I hate fluff in novels. I hate fluff in academic writing. So why do I write sentence after sentence of pointless fluff? Many reasons: too scared to take a more rigid style. That sounds like a paradox, I know, 'cause we tend to think that rigid thinking and style follows a scientific blueprint. Another reason: too lazy. Another: need to decide what I want to say. Need to think harder. Cut the crap. Get to the essentials. The problem is I can only know what I want to say by a shitload of exploration of writing. The hard task is to go about the revisioning of these wanderings with a stern, stern hand. ("The bloody hard road" etc.)
Another thing is English. I still have lots and lots of work to do to write decent English. I mean English sentences not abundant with grammatical and idiomatical mistakes. - That is one reason why I keep this horrendous blob, sorry, blog. This problem makes me even more aware of my stylistic insecurities. When I write in English, I tend to imitate a particular style, rather than write in a style that suits what I want to say. E.g.: I try the more complicated word just to show off a little. The result: the text become moronic, me not even noticing it because I am too obsessed with writing "nice". And, you know, I imitate what comes most natural to me. "The wittgensteinians". I start a sentence, "there is no general...." and then I gag, unable to finish it. I start another sentence, "We tend to think that..." then luckily I come to think of my stern friend Y, We-hater Y ("who ARE "we"????) and I proceed to push the dear old DELETE-button.
Hello, blank screen. Misery/misery/micery.
But what scares me most is that I'll write a thesis in which the thinking could be shipped straight off to the graveyard (dig&dig fast). To be honest, how many philosophers have you read whose texts have really preserved the liveliness of thinking? A few. The best. Not many.
This scares the shit out of me, it really does. Sometimes it scares me so much that I don't even feel like writing at all. Like: I don't want to burp all of this text-crap. Like: I really have to make an effort but it is immensly laborious. The truth: self-obsession is the worst enemy of writing.

PS: I am NOT talking about style in the sense that I want to prop up a boring argument with elegant style. I just want to write what I mean without taking refuge in scientific nonsense-language or linguistic doodle. But as Malcolm Tucker in the brilliant Brittish TV-series The Thick of it would have it: "YER ON YER OOUN" (yelled in coarse Scottish accent).