Horrible things happen. Incredible things happen. Other people exert their influence. People die. Events that bond one group of siblings will fracture and alienate another. There are simply too many variables in life for anyone with a conscience to claim, “Just do such-and-such, and your kids will turn out thus-and-so!” Beware such dangerous nonsense.
However, according to an extremely unscientific poll I conducted, parents can do some things — and avoid some things — to help influence their children so they will be more likely to remain friends with their siblings when they are adults.
What a joy to discover a new (to me) singer. I stumbled across Michael Kiwanuka last weekend while mucking out my little girls’ room and listening to whatever YouTube suggested. This is a nearly perfect song, so tender, simple, and true. Enjoy!
Little bit of Otis Redding, maybe a little bit of Van Morrison, little bit of The Band, little bit of something very, very old in every human heart. This is a good year for music! I think people are getting tired of trick voices and precious, twee gimmicks, and the singers with souls are stepping up.
Here’s another gorgeous, heart-rending one from Kiwanuka, who was raised in London by parents who escaped the Idi Amin regime in Uganda.
In a completely different vein! “Without you, I’m just bones.” Love it.
There is nothing I like better to read than plans, tips, and strategies for keeping the house clean and orderly. A large household in a relatively small living space quickly degenerates into chaos and disorder without constant vigilance and persistent rectification of why is this sticky. Can I not just once in my life sit down without getting all sticky.
So that’s why I like to sit there with my feet up, reading about how to clean.
I especially like the schedules that tell you exactly what to do, how often. You’ve seen these: mop up spills immediately, tidy living areas daily, deep-clean bathrooms weekly, scrub baseboards monthly, douse upholstery with kerosene, strike a match, and delight in the glorious inferno of the final answer to domesticity quarterly. I mean, “never.” Never even think of that. What is the matter with you?
The one thing I haven’t found anywhere is a guide for what kind of cleaning to do depending on what kind of guest you’re expecting. It does make a difference, n’est-ce pas, you animal? From my Tohu wa-bohu to yours:
Female guests age 11 and up: Scrub shower curtain, because women are insane and are going to judge you on your shower curtain, even if they aren’t taking a shower. Decades from now, the master of ceremonies at your funeral is going to ask, “Does anyone have a memory to share of our extraordinary friend Simcha, who lived to be 106 years old, won the Nobel Peace Prize twice, and figured out how to desalinate ocean water with a simple wooden spool and a paper clip?” and that woman who stopped by to pick up a free typewriter you listed on Craigslist, and who asked if she could use your bathroom, will stand up and she will say, “Her shower curtain had mildew.”
Did you know you can just put the whole shower curtain in the washing machine? Don’t actually run the machine with a shower curtain in it, stupid; you’ll tear it to shreds. I’m just saying, you can put it in there.
Nice French Canadian ladies named Enid and Célestin who are bringing over a casserole because you just had a baby: Just have the baby waiting by the door. They are there for the baby, and the casserole is their ticket inside. If you want to make them extra happy, hang up some gooey picture of Our Lady of Maybelline. Note: Do not let them leave with the baby. Check their bags. Nice try, Célestin.
Any kids age 7 and under; and boys age 12 and under: Just clear a pathway, practice those breathing exercises for when they start tracking unspeakable things through the hallway, and make sure at least one toilet works and/or you know where the shovel is.
Priest in the house: Buy extra beer and extra meat, and crate the dog. Other than that, do nothing. He really needs to know what goes on.
Husband’s work friend: Meet him in the driveway and shunt him directly into the backyard where the beer is. He definitely doesn’t need to know what goes on.
College friends who always thought you were fairly dim, because you fairly were: Upgrade bathroom reading material. Aim for Lexile score of 1400 or higher. National Geographic is acceptable, as long as it’s not too wet and nobody has written “ha ha boobie” on the African parts. If you went liberal arts, poetry anthologies are a solid choice. No Magic Tree House or Animorphs. They wouldn’t understand.
Anybody: No NFP charts on the fridge. Come on. And yes, everybody knows what “I” or “*” or “:)” or “ha cha cha” notations mean, especially if they’re clustered around the end of the month. No visible cups of pee, even if there is a good and holy reason for having cups of pee hanging around. No boxes of test strips that say “HELPS YOU GET SUPER EXTRA PREGNANT MUCH MUCH FASTER!” Even people who love you, love your kids, and are totally on board with the whole “culture of life” thing are going to stand there, transfixed, their eyes darting back and forth between the forty-six toothbrushes you somehow have, and the toilet paper you’re forced to buy in bulk sizes that would shame an army barracks, and those words “PREGNANT FASTER,” and they’re going to think, “I need to leave before these people try to hide a spare baby in my purse.”
Hey, come on back. There’s plenty of beer in the back yard.
I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.
That’s good enough for me. We’ll read the Declaration of Independence, grill three kinds of meat, hand sparklers to children who have no business wielding sparklers, and set off all the gloriously-named fireworks we can afford.
We’ll serve frozen ham balls to all our doggy guests. We’ll secretly be relieved that the grass is way too dry to even consider lighting Brillo pad fire wheels of spectacular death.We’ll open up that lovely, heavy carton from the liquor store.
We’ll spend the other 364 days of the year reflecting, brooding, maybe mourning what we’ve lost, maybe strategizing about how to regain what we once fought to win.
But today? Ring a bell! Light a bonfire! Run around, make a fuss, live it up! John Adams says so. We spend a lot of time discussing what our founding fathers intended for our country, and what they would say if they were alive today. And here it is: have a damn party. It’s good to be an American.
Do you know about frozen grapes? Such an excellent summer snack. I thought I had more to say about it, but that’s really it.
Here’s what we had this week. And now that I upload all the pictures, I see that we ate a lot of fruit this week. Well, good.
***
SATURDAY Birthday cookout!
There were three extra people over for dinner, and I succumbed to Guest Hysteria. Instead of our usual thirteen burgers, I made thirty-four. And twenty-four hot dogs. And fifteen ears of corn on the cob, and six bags of chips, and salad, and cake, and ice cream, and one of those pinata-sized bags of candy. And dip. And a watermelon.
Birthday boy is a Go fan, so this was his cake, before I prettied up the edges:
The game pieces are Mentos and Junior Mints. The burnt sugar frosting was the perfect color for the wooden board, and I loved the caramel flavor, but the recipe I used was dreadful, so confusing. It was hot. I get confused easily. Waiting for the soft ball stage always makes me question my priorities, so I always reassure myself by eating gobs and gobs of hot sugar slurry, and then I have a brain-squeezing headache for 48 hours. I told my doctor about this, and he laughed and said that he wished all his patients got terrible headaches whenever they ate sugar. Then I paid him a bunch of money.
and don’t appreciate things with a silent “s” at the end, unless it’s “corps,” because they like to say “corpse.” Hurr hurr.
So no clafoutis. Here is what the barbarians did enjoy: mixed fruit sauce over French vanilla ice cream. I sliced up the fruit, put it in a pot with a little sugar and homemade vanilla extract, and let it cook for about ten minutes.
In my head, I made a little joke about how scandalous it was that those berries were all openly macerating, with little children around. Someone needs a little theology of the body! Theology of the berry. It was hot, I was confused.
Oh, do you know how to pit cherries quickly? Pull off the stem, put the cherry right-side-up on top of an empty beer bottle, and poke straight down with a chopstick. The pit falls into the bottle and you have a neatly-pitted cherry.
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MONDAY Chicken fajitas
These were pretty lackluster. Just strips of chicken, peppers, and onions rolled up in tortillas with not enough spices and some chopped tomatoes. I forgot to buy cheese and I forgot to put out the sour cream and I forgot to add the cilantro. Not terrible, just not . . . luster. There was a lot of it, though.
The pasta salad was unexpectedly tasty. Farfalle with bottled Italian dressing from Aldi, the cilantro I suddenly remembered, a ton of black olives, and chopped red onions.
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WEDNESDAY Gochujang bulgoki with seaweed and rice; sesame string beans
Still the greatest recipe I’ve found in many a year. I bought Sempio brand gochujang online. I prepped the meat and veggies and started marinating them the night before, so all I had to do was cook it up.
Basic recipe:
1.5 pounds sliced pork 1 bag matchstick carrots 1 white onions sliced thin
Mix everything together and let it marinate at least five hours. Cook it up in a pan without oil. Devour. You can wrap up the pork in little bundles of lettuce leaves with a little rice. I used seaweed wraps instead of lettuce.
The string beans, I mixed up with some sesame oil, soy sauce, and sesame seeds, and just sauteed them quickly. Veddy good.
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THURSDAY Meatball subs; fruit salad
[img attachment=”110189″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”meatball sub fruit salad” /]
Kind of a weird meal, but well-received. What makes it weirder is that I deliberately planned this particular meal six weeks ago, when I signed up for a Meal Train. My husband made 100+ meatballs the day before. The lucky other family also got store-bought cookies.
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FRIDAY Eggs and harsh browns
#1 son is working on a farm this summer, and just walked in the door with a few dozen fresh eggs. Fresh, local, organic food is usually a lot like regular food, except way more expensive and way dirtier. BUT FRESH EGGS ARE DIFFERENT. The yolks are a fervent golden, the flavor is so much richer, and they even cook up more fluffily. If you have a source of fresh eggs, treat yourself. It’s totally worth it.
For almost twenty years, we’ve been battling the idea of keeping chickens and ducks. I even insisted that we save the old trampoline frame so we can turn it into a coop-in-the-round. This year, we came to a decision: we will have chickens when we are grandparents. That way, we can raise chickens when we don’t also have to raise kids, and our grandchildren can enjoy chickens without our kids having to raise chickens when they’re also raising kids.
***
Oh! We finally found our copy of An Unexpected Cookbook: The Unofficial Book of Hobbit Cookery and my daughter has been working her way through the recipes. This week, she made blueberry scones and mini apple pies. I’m trying to make myself push her to find a summer job, but if she ends up staying home and making Hobbit food, well . . .
And another thing! Summer vacation means more hot lunches. One day, we made a couple of batches of what I prosaically call “egg in toast.”
[img attachment=”110203″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”egg in toast” /]
Pretty self-explanatory, but since this is a recipe post: rip a hole out of a slice of bread, and fry it up in plenty of butter. Carefully crack an egg into the hole. After a few minutes, flip it over and let it fry a little more.
It turns out everyone has a different name for this pleasant little dish: toady holeys, toad in a hole, egg in a hole, egg in a nest, frog in a puddle, one-eyed jacks, eggs in a basket, popeyed eggs, pirate eyes, nest eggs, egg in a frame, man on a raft, and dipsy doodle eggs. Do you call it something else? Will you come over and make me some?
It’s Thursday and I am half sick of shadows. How about some miscellaneous mental marginalia?
First: caption contest! Pietro Lorenzetti, who seems to specialize in Madonnas who have just about had it, painted the image above. Maybe it’s just summer vacation talking, but to me it says, “You don’t have to stop making that squirty sound, but you have to make it over there.”
Four: Most of the time, women’s tennis is about as important to me as men’s tennis, which is to say “not.” But I saw the dumb little flippy nightie Nike required its sponsored athletes to wear to Wimbledon, and I says to myself, I says, “How come they never do this to men?” Seriously. Official uniforms for professional athletes should be all about making it easy for the athlete to be athletic. No foofiness. Is outrage. I shall now go back to forgetting that tennis exists.
Five:A truly handy compendium of charts for bakers, including egg substitutes, metric conversion charts, which tips to use when icing cupcakes, how to diagnose baking temp errors, and so on.
Six: WEED WHACKER MAN!
Public shaming of kids on social media is such a crap move. Every few weeks, some self-styled “meanest mom in the world” preens herself over having the courage to make her kids miserable in public, rather than correcting them and moving along like normal parents do. Don’t be fooled. This isn’t about being a good parent; it’s about getting your fifteen minutes of internet fame in the pathetic and craven hope that you can somehow spin your child’s damaged psyche into a reality show. For that reason I refuse to link to any of these creeps.
However. Glomming off your kids’ public humiliation is one thing. Bribing your kids to be publicly humiliated is a completely different thing. One is exploitation, and that’s wrong. This is just good old fashioned commerce. And so I present to you this video made yesterday on the ride home from the oral surgeon, where my daughter had four wisdom teeth extracted.
I only wish I had gotten footage of the part where she was furiously working on a BFG-themed Mad Libs. I noticed she had x-ed out several words vehemently, so I asked her why. She shouted, mouth packed with gauze, “BE-TUZ THEY NOT WEAL WORDS!!!”
I said, “But you’ve read the book, haven’t you?” And she gave me one of these!
And then, because I’m the meanest mom in the world, I got her some chocolate ice cream.
**
Images:
Pietro Lorenzetti [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
By Georg Heinrich Sieveking (http://www.uncp.edu/home/rwb/louis16_execution.jpg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Don’t be stupid, be a smarty! Meet Benedict XVI on his own terms. I guarantee you’ll be delighted, both with what you come to learn about Christ, and what you come to learn about Ratzinger himself. He’s a gentle and brilliant friend you need to have in your life. He is a man full of heartfelt courtesy and love — not abstract, intellectualized caritas, but a sweet yearning to save, comfort, sanctify and teach his flock.
You probably know someone with Type 1 diabetes — that’s the kind you treat with insulin. Somewhere between 1.25 and three million Americans have it, and about 15-20% of these are children.
Bella Nichols, age 8, is one of these children. To stay alive, she requires insulin that costs more per month than her family’s mortgage payment. Her mother, Nicole, was having a hard time getting Mississippi Medicaid to pay for her daughter’s essential diabetes treatment supplies, which are supposed to be covered, and which cost around $2,500 a month; so, like a reasonable citizen, she wrote to her state reps for help. She wrote:
We have recently begun having a lot of problems with Medicaid/CHIPS coverage of the essential diabetes supplies needed, not only to keep our kids healthy, but to literally keep them alive…No parents should have to fight for so long for their child’s essential medical supplies and medical needs when it’s explicitly stated as a covered benefit.
Three of the representatives responded. One of them, Rep. Jeffrey Guice, said this:
I am sorry for your problem. Have you thought about buying the supplies with money that you earn?
That was his whole response.
There are three reasons he might respond in such a way.
Second: He thinks state insurance should refuse to pay for life-saving medical supplies, because the high cost of medicine works nicely as a kind of man-made natural selection, weeding out the unfit in the name of fiscal responsibility. (If you think no one would dare espouse such a brutal worldview, go ahead and read the comments section. I dare you.)
Third: He thinks it should be easy to pay for diabetes supplies out of pocket, either because he has no idea how much money the typical family earns, or because he has no idea how much diabetes supplies cost. Either one is completely unacceptable for a state rep whose entire job is to know, understand, and work for the people he represents.
Oh, did I mention? Guice is on the State Public Health And Human Services Committee. I’ll just let the irony of that title sink in for a moment. Public Health! and Human Services! Maybe he stumbled into the wrong room, and he actually intended to join a different committee, say the Darwinian Inhumane Kommissariat for Handily Eliminating Deadweights. In fact, I nominate him as chairman for life of DIKHED.
Yesterday, after social media got wind of his response to Nichols, Guice apologized:
“I realize my remarks to Mrs. Nichols were completely insensitive and out of line,” said Guice. “I am sorry and deeply regret my reply. I know nothing about her and her family and replied in a knee-jerk fashion. I’d like to think the people of Mississippi and my constituents know that I’m willing to help where I am able.”
Uh uh. I’d like to think that today is Guice’s last day on a job for which he’s manifestly unfit. The “help” he claims to be willing to offer is only his to offer because his power comes from his constituents, who have every right to ask for his help getting the benefits they’re legally entitled to. I can’t imagine what else he thinks he is there for, unless it’s to sit back and enjoy the excellent health insurance he gets through the state.
Someone’s the leech here. Someone’s exploiting taxpayer-funded benefits, someone’s refusing to pull his weight, and someone doesn’t want to live up to his responsibilities, but I don’t think it’s the eight-year-old with diabetes. If you want to see an unscrupulous citizens collecting government benefits and refusing to do an honest day’s work, take a look at the house of representatives in Mississippi.
Today’s a fine day to have an egg cream. It’s Mel Brooks’ 90th birthday!
Brooks — born Kaminsky — is a man with the disturbing power to reduce me to a gargling, inarticulate heap. When I was too young to get most of the jokes in his movies, I used to just watch my mother watching his movies, screeeeeeeaming with laughter, tears rolling down her cheeks, as limp and helpless as a puppet.
It’s an interesting story; I don’t think I’ll tell it. Can I interest you in a Raisinet? No? Maybe you’d like a chocolate-covered Volkswagen? Do you have a dollar on you? I hate to answer questions for nothing. [Accepts a dollar] Thank you. For two more I’ll sell you my T-shirt. See this little alligator on the pocket? I understand that in the Everglades, there are alligators with little Jews on their shirt pockets.
There he was, at the height of his career, still hustling to earn his audience. Sometimes he crashes and burns, but it’s always because he tries too hard, not because he’s lazy. As he tells the Playboy interviewer, of his early career:
I would jump off into space, not knowing where I would land. I would run across tightropes, no net. If I fell, blood all over. Pain. Humiliation. In those pitch sessions, I had an audience of experts and they showed no mercy. But I had to go beyond. It wasn’t only competition to be funnier than they were. I had to get to the ultimate punch line, you know, the cosmic joke that all the other jokes came out of. I had to hit all the walls. I was immensely ambitious. It was like I was screaming at the universe to pay attention. Like I had to make God laugh.
Here are a few of the more printable excerpts from the interview. Do read the whole thing — to hear about his childhood, his meteoric success and the time all he had left was his Tolstoy and an iron skate key; to hear him quoting Joseph Conrad and referencing Rembrandt, Chagall, and Prometheus; to relish him parsing the influence of the fart joke and comparing Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and, when things get too personal, repeatedly trying to force Raisinets on the interviewer. Read about his passionate love for his second wife, Anne Bancroft, whom he married with a repurposed silver earring instead of a wedding ring; about his deep longing for his father, and about how much he hates directing movies, but does it “in self-defense.”
On the intended audience for Blazing Saddles:
Actually, it was designed as an esoteric little picture. We wrote it for two weirdos in the balcony. For radicals, film nuts, guys who draw on the washroom wall—my kind of people.
On filming The Twelve Chairs in Yugoslavia to save money:
To begin with, it’s a very long flight to Yugoslavia and you land in a field of full-grown corn. They figure it cushions the landing. The first thing they tell you is that the water is death. The only safe thing to drink is Kieselavoda, which is a mild laxative. In nine months, I lost 71 pounds. Now, at night, you can’t do anything, because all of Belgrade is lit by a ten-watt bulb, and you can’t go anywhere, because Tito has the car. It was a beauty, a green ‘38 Dodge. And the food in Yugoslavia is either very good or very bad. One day we arrived on location late and starving and they served us fried chains. When we got to our hotel rooms, mosquitoes as big as George Foreman were waiting for us. They were sitting in armchairs with their legs crossed.
The Yugoslav crew was very nice and helpful, but you had to be careful. One day in a fit of pique, I hurled my director’s chair into the Adriatic. Suddenly I heard “Halugchik! Kakdivmyechisny bogdanblostrov!” On all sides, angry voices were heard and clenched fists were raised. “The vorkers,” I was informed, “have announced to strike!” “But why?” “You have destroyed the People’s chair!” “But it’s mine! It says Mel Brooks on it!” “In Yugoslavia, everything is property of People.” So we had a meeting, poured a lot of vodka, got drunk, started to cry and sing and kiss each other. Wonderful people! If they had another ten-watt bulb, I’d go there to live.
Here are some memories of his mother, who raised him and his three siblings alone after her husband died young:
Playboy: Did your mother have time to look after you?
Brooks: I was adored. I was always in the air, hurled up and kissed and thrown in the air again. Until I was six, my feet didn’t touch the ground. “Look at those eyes! That nose! Those lips! That tooth! Get that child away from me, quick! I’ll eat him!” Giving that up was very difficult later on in life.
He’s not kidding about that difficulty. He explains later that, the higher he climbed and the more he earned, the more he was wracked by anxiety, uncontrollable panic, and grief. A therapist helped him manage his anxiety, but, he says, “then we got into much deeper stuff—whether or not one should live and why.”
Brooks: The main thing I remember from then is bouts of grief for no apparent reason. Deep melancholy, incredible grief where you’d think that somebody very close to me had died. You couldn’t grieve any more than I was grieving.
Playboy: Why?
Brooks: It was connected with accepting life as an adult, getting out in the real world. I was grieving about the death of childhood.
…
You often hear, you know, that people go into show business to find the love they never had when they were children. Never believe it! Every comic and most of the actors I know had a childhood full of love. Then they grew up and found out that in the grown-up world, you don’t get all that love, you just get your share. So they went into show business to recapture the love they had known as children when they were the center of the universe.
On the initial reactions to Blazing Saddles:
A lot of crickets said the film was chaotic—kitchen-sink school of drama. Not true. Every scene and damn near every line in the film were in the script. Even the farts were in the script. It was calculated chaos. Something a lot of people don’t yet realize about me: I am a very well-trained maniac.
The most concise explanation of comedy I’ve ever heard:
The greatest comedy plays against the greatest tragedy. Comedy is a red rubber ball and if you throw it against a soft, funny wall, it will not come back. But if you throw it against the hard wall of ultimate reality, it will bounce back and be very lively. Vershteh, goy b****rd? No offense. Very, very few people understand this.
And finally, his recipe for that egg cream you really should hoist in his honor today:
Brooks: First, you got to get a can of Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate syrup. If you use any other chocolate, the egg cream will be too bitter or too mild. Take a big glass and fill one fifth of it with U-Bet syrup. Then add about half a shot glass of milk. And you gotta have a seltzer spout with two speeds. One son-of-a-b****h b*****d that comes out like bullets and scares you; one normal, regular-person speed that comes out nice and soft and foamy. So hit the tough b*****d, the bullets of seltzer, first. Smash through the milk into the chocolate and chase the chocolate furiously all around the glass. Then, when the mixture is halfway up the glass, you turn on the gentle stream and you fill the glass with seltzer, all the time mixing with a spoon. Then taste it. But sit down first, because you might swoon with ecstasy.
Playboy: What does an egg cream do for you?
Brooks: Physically, it contributes mildly to your high blood sugar. Psychologically, it is the opposite of circumcision. It pleasurably reaffirms your Jewishness. But what is all this with egg creams? Isn’t this a Playboy Interview? When are you going to ask me about sex?
Every few months, someone asks me how to write better. Here’s my advice, which I sometimes even follow myself:
Write almost every day. The more you write, the easier it is to write. You will have feasts and famines — times when you can barely type fast enough to keep ahead of the flood of ideas, and times when you have to strain every muscle to get all the way from the subject to the object; but if writing is part of your routine for long enough, you will always be able to write, even when you’re not inspired to write.
Be a good reader. Read authors you admire every day, and think about why you admire their writing. Also figure out why you don’t like the writers you don’t like. Don’t just run your eyes over the page and then turn away with a happy sigh or an irritated huff. Instead, be like an obnoxious wine connoisseur: hold the words and ideas and phrasing in your mouth, swish them around, breathe across them, consider the origins, attend to the aftertaste. Good writers are active readers.
Always be listening. If you want something to write about, put your nets out all day long. Don’t wait until you’re sitting in front of they keyboard to hunt for an idea. Keep paper notes if you must; but it’s better to get in the habit of making mental notes, which can always be retrieved.
Do these things every day. What about when you have an actual assignment (self-imposed or otherwise) in front of you? How do you improve your style?
This post from 2011 covers most of what I still advise, so I won’t revise it much. Most of these tips apply to less formal pieces, like blog posts, short articles, or even comments—anything where you’re trying to make a point. If you’re working on a research project, though, you’re on your own.
APPROACHING THE TOPIC
1. Make sure you know what you mean, or at least what you’re wondering about. You don’t have to be an expert. Often, the things that need to be said are the things that people already know, but have forgotten—or things they don’t realize that other people are thinking. So it’s okay to be simple, as long as you know exactly what it is you want to say.
If you’re still hashing it out in your mind, be upfront about that, and ask questions of the reader. Don’t pretend to be more sure than you actually are.
2. Make it clear why your topic needs to be addressed. You’ll look silly if you get all worked up clarifying something that no one was confused about. If you are righting a wrong, introduce your piece by summing up the wrong, citing at least one example. One easy trick is to literally ask a question, and then answer it. Or start with a short anecdote which explains what started your train of thought.
3. Don’t resort to defensive writing. Nobody wants to read about what you’re not saying. Say what you do mean. Say it as clearly and firmly as you can —and then let it go. After a certain point, if people hear what you’re not saying, then it’s their problem, and not yours. You don’t owe them a second essay restating your point. Do your best, and move along.
4. Don’t be afraid of minor or simple ideas. Don’t hold out for the obviously profound. If you are an intelligent person, an image, idea, or phrase rings your bell for a reason. Go ahead and write about it—you may be onto something.
5. Be honest. If you’re afraid your idea isn’t holding up, your readers will notice, too, so don’t force it. On the other hand, “I used to think so-and-so, but I’ve changed my mind—here’s why” essays are always interesting.
6. Go ahead and circle back one more time. Have you noticed that you write about the same five themes over and over and over again? That’s okay. The best writing comes from insatiable fascination with a particular theme, not from fleeting infatuations with passing ideas.
EDITING
1. Editing should make you sweat. It’s okay to write down every last thing you can think of . . . on your first draft. Often “covering the page” is the only way to figure out what you’re actually trying to say, and sometimes your main point doesn’t emerge until you’ve written around it for several hundred words. But don’t leave it that way. Even if a passage is brilliant, funny, and flows sweet and clear like Grade A honey—it may not belong in this piece. Every word must work in service of your point, or else it’s gotta go.
Even if I’m delighted with what I wrote, I cut out about 10% just on principle.
2. Read it out loud. This is the best way to root out dumb phrases, snootiness, babbling, awkward transitions, repeated words, mixed metaphors, and pronoun trouble. If it’s an important piece, ask someone else to read it, and be ready to accept criticism.
3. Review the sequence of ideas. Often, an essay doesn’t sit well because the right elements are all there, but are out of order. Try putting your last paragraph at the beginning, and see how that settles. If I’m really muddled, I make an outline that describes what I’ve written. Reducing it to bare bones often shows the flaws hiding in the verbiage.
4. Titles are telling. Not sure if you have a unified idea? Try coming up with a descriptive title for the finished piece. If this is hard, then you may not have said anything, or tried to say too much.
5. Clarity before fanciness. It’s fun to write the occasional sentence that makes people go, “Whoa, let me read that again! It sounds cool, but I’m not quite sure what it means.” But that must be the rare exception. Most of what you say should be plain as plain can be. You’re supposed to be drawing attention to your ideas, not your fancy, fancy self.
6. But dogive your readers a treat or two. We all spend enough time reading instruction manuals and tedious jargon. Find the two or three paragraphs that really need to land, and goose them like crazy. Search for the most pungent, evocative phrases you’ve been storing in the back shelves of your psyche, and fiddle with word order until any other order is unthinkable. Earn your readers!
7. Remember the Five B’s: Be Brief, Boy, Be Brief. I love to read, but I’m lazy, I’m tired, I’m distracted, and I rarely read a piece that’s longer than 1,000 words. Most of your readers are even lazier. Try breaking up perfectly good paragraphs into mini-paragraphs, just to make them easier to swallow. Cheap, but it works.
BONUS TIPS:
Try to make the sentence structure express emphasis, rather than resorting to italics.
Pretend exclamation points and ellipses cost you $65 per use.
If you find yourself using emoticons or gifs, chop your hands off.
Go ahead and manhandle the language. I believe in splitting infinitives, writing incomplete and run-on sentences, saying “they” when “he” is more correct, and generally causing a little downfall of western civilization from time to time, if it gives the writing more punch or better flow. So sue me.
