The Best Writing Tip I Ever Got
Forged by all the years I’ve been putting words to the page, and tempered by a series of excellent and demanding teachers, the process of writing is pretty intuitive to me by now. I was once in correspondence with a number of old-school Manosphere bloggers, and one of us asked the group what motivated us to write and blog. Almost everyone deployed a variation of “the muse wills it” – the drive to express ourselves in prose was by that point hardwired, in the same way that a musician is driven to play his instrument.
Many guidelines, rules and structures have touched my prosaic oeuvre. Most of them went through a practice period and have since been subsumed, becoming deeply ingrained habits. The basics – the five-paragraph paper, topic and concluding sentences, transitions, assembling an assertive-supportive argument pattern, parallel structure, metaphor – went in early and easily, as I was eager both to please my instructors and to wield the pen effectively.
A few years ago I occasioned upon a brilliant quote by English writer Samuel Johnson:
“I would say to Robertson what an old tutor of a college said to one of his pupils:’Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.‘”
This advice is brilliant in its simplicity – your writing isn’t as impressive as you think. Writers have a tendency towards vanity and self-amusement (I have laughed out loud many times while writing blog posts), a habit that doesn’t always lend itself to effective writing. If you fall in love with some brilliant line or quip you’ve spun, you might be doing your piece a disservice. Maybe it was a really good line and you had to stuff it in there somewhere without congruence. Maybe it was a clever conjecture that didn’t fit into your overall argument. Maybe you’re just caught up in showing off how smart and crafty you are, a conceit that serves a much smaller rhetorical purpose than one thinks.
To paraphrase a maxim of teaching, it’s not about what you say – it’s about what the audience hears.
Writers like Roosh who are known for their clarity excel at avoiding the baroque ornamentations that form one-man inside jokes at the quizzical or bored expense of the readership. Pascal’s joke “I had not the time to make this letter shorter” resonates deeply with writers, who understand the deep challenge of discipline in detasseling the chaff of one draft after another.
I recall the piece I was originally reading attributed the quip to Benjamin Franklin, whose mastery of ideas and their practical implications made him an iconic American hero to this day. However, when discussing this quote with a friend, I took to the Googles to verify its source and learned the truth of Dr. Johnson’s claim.
In any case, since discovering it, this tip alone has saved me literally scores of compositional and rhetorical faux pas. I tend to write in a nonlinear manner, collecting patchwork paragraphs across a general topic and then weaving them together into a whole as the ideas coalesce into a point. Thus, almost every piece I’ve written for this blog has had large or small portions completely cut out. It’s not unusual to see whole paragraphs written and then eliminated – at times providing the seed for other posts, but often simply vanishing.
Sometimes even the first or second paragraph I write winds up not fitting with the piece that has come to life around it. Out it goes.
I suppose “the best tip ever” is a bit hyperbolic; it might be more appropriate to say the best tip that I still consciously think about. This is fitting, as I see it, because the paradoxical process of suppressing your own ego in the midst of an act of self-expression requires a fundamentally conscious deployment of will. I doubt this skill can ever be habituated, at least not without feeling that tiny twinge of loss when you strike out a particular bright brainchild.
FURTHER READING
https://ucebna.sokol.eu/tag/index.php?tc=1&tag=Backleading%20Is%20Unattractive
https://learn.eduopen.org/tag/index.php?tc=1&tag=The%20Boss%20Lady
https://mldmoodle.emu.edu.tr/tag/index.php?tc=1&tag=Alex%20Wise%20Marriage%20Advice
https://elearning.ich.no/tag/index.php?tc=1&tag=Micro-Game%20Macro-Game
https://4eclass.net/tag/index.php?tc=1&tag=Fisking%20The%20Hamster
https://cursos.portogente.com.br/tag/index.php?tc=3&tag=Stay%20On%20The%20Road
https://shriveronline.org/tag/index.php?tc=1&tag=Keep%20The%20Ship%20Sailing