on writing…
I have been accused at an increasing rate over the last few years of being a good writer. I don’t know if this is true or not but I can’t say I haven’t worked at being a better writer over the last ten or so years so maybe I am. Anyway, the website/distraction engine Lifehacker is doing a series of posts this week about writing tips and tricks in celebration of November being NaNoWriMo–that’s National Novel Writing Month. So I thought I would post a few thoughts on things that have been helpful to me. Many of these thoughts are not original to me, Lord knows there’s only been a few millennia of writers trying to improve themselves and their craft, but maybe they will be new to you.
The first thing you have to learn about becoming a better writer is that it takes a long time, a seriously long time. I started journalling–which I’ll come back to in a bit–when I was 16 because I wanted to be a better writer. I knew that the only way to get better was to start writing on a regular basis and to consistently stick with it. What I also knew is I wasn’t going to improve overnight. Indeed I don’t think it made much of a difference in my writing until I was well into my twenties and living in California.
Journalling did not, however, make me a better speller or grammarian. My journal is really closer to a girls diary frankly, lots of pages about crushes and relationships and struggles with faith and post-modern existentialism. Ok, maybe the stereotypical girl doesn’t write pages and pages about Descartes but my point is that my journal isn’t a place where I wrote with an agenda in mind. Sometimes it is a “brain dump” of ideas I’m thinking through but usually it’s just a page or two about what’s going on in my life at any given point. But this has given me what I think is the strongest aspect of my writing. Voice.
I’m convinced the best writing has a strong voice. By voice in writing I mean it is straight forward and flows naturally. Most great writers have a good clear voice but the two I follow who really stand out to me are Donald Miller and Anthony Bourdain. When you read things written by Miller and Bourdain you can almost hear their own audible voice in your head. Because they are clear and to the point, using simple “every day” language you can engage with the deeper concepts they are trying to get across. I think the reason Donald Miller has been so popular with “millennial” Christians is that he has been able to boil down complex theological, philosophical and cultural concepts into plain every day language. It’s not that he has simplified the concepts, just that he talks about them using language his readers use every day instead of barricading himself behind dense academic phraseology. With Anthony Bourdain, he writes with the same mix of pop culture aware wit and gruff coarse language of a overworked chef. And it endears us to him because we know he isn’t a travel show pitch man highlighting the plush luxury of the local Marriott, he’s the same witty and sarcastic Tony we know and love from No Reservations. There is authenticity in what both Miller and Bourdain write because we know it’s them writing it.
I’ve read a lot of academic journal articles and book essays since starting grad school that have made me want to claw my eyes out from sheer boredom. They are plodding and dense and assume I have a level of interest in the subject sufficient to get me to invest enough energy in deciphering what the author is trying to say. Now, I don’t believe all of these researchers are as boring in real life as their papers make them out to be. I am convinced that when you know your voice, when you write with authority and clarity, your writing is infused with the passion you have for the subject you are writing about. If p-values and statistical significance really get you going in the morning, share your enthusiasm with me! I’ve read academic papers about research methods that bored me to death but I’ve also read blog posts dealing with many of the same statistical ideas in the context of baseball sabermetrics that have me wishing I’d have been a math major in college. We get so caught up in sounding smart and using the right language that we forget to be interesting.
You may have noticed over the course of this blog post I have used contractions and to be verbs liberally and there may even be a few extraneous “thats” floating around. There is a time and a place for “perfect” academic writing that meets and is held to higher standards. But this is a blog post and when I speak I use lots of contractions, slang and run on sentences. I proofread everything I write for this blog and I do tighten up the language and rewrite things that are unclear or could be said better. However, I don’t catch everything and on occasion I have found typos or grammatical errors here and there. I also don’t change everything I do catch. If I like the flow of a sentence written wrong more than the structure of a sentence written right, I’ll leave it as is. That’s the thing I have come to love about writing though–it’s not about being perfect, it’s about writing. If you want to be a better writer, if you want to write a novel or a memoir or just a better Facebook status, you just start writing. Then you write some more. And then you write a little more. Find a time in the morning or over your lunch break or at night before you go to bed to spend writing. Maybe it is just boring content about your day. Maybe you write a blog post that only your parents and one or two Facebook friends reads. But you’ve got to start writing.
So if you’re doing NaNoWriMo, good for you. I’m excited you are boldly trying something as audacious as writing an entire 50000 word novel in a month. That’s ballsy. But it also means you need to stop reading this post and get back to your writing. Well, maybe take a little bit more time to read the fantastic Merlin Mann’s advice about “National Read Endless Superficial Advice About Writing Month”, and then get back to work. Good luck!
