How To Write
To err is human, and interesting
Spending time on Substack Notes I see depressingly large numbers of posts and essays all claiming to teach fledgling Substackers how to write better and get more subscribers.
I use the word ‘depressingly’ because of how often these posts and essays are not accompanied by the little check marks that indicate the writer actually manages to sell some work.
Taking writing advice from someone who no one actually reads just doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me.
I’m not going to claim to know much about writing. I’m not going to claim to have been well educated in the art of writing. But, I am going to claim that lots of people read my work every day, and some like it enough to pay for it. I know this to be true, because I have one of those little checkmarks. You know that I ain’t lyin’ because you can see it too.
The thing is, I have very little writing advice to offer. I don’t know much.
But, I do know something.
And I think that it might be important for me to do my part fighting the flood of writers whom no one reads offering writing advice on Substack.
In that spirit, with this little essay, I’ll offer what I know.
If you are interested in writing, I truly do hope that you will find it helpful.
If we want people to read our work it must be understandable and it must be interesting.
That’s all I know.
I am extremely proud of the readership I have. But some others have vastly more readers than I. Perhaps; probably they know more about writing than I do.
All I know is that it has to be understandable and interesting.
But, I also know how to expand upon those two things, so hop in and buckle up for a brief ride.
I’m a really active Freemason. As such, I know that in 1871 an extremely prominent Freemason published a vitally important book about Freemasonry, and it has been published ever since.
Indeed, this book has been so widely distributed, for so many years, that most Masonic buildings in my part of the world have at least a half dozen or even a dozen copies laying around.
But the book is read by virtually no one.
Years ago, when I became a Freemason, I read the book. And one of my first friends in my Lodge announced to the group that I had done so. Everyone seemed shocked. No one else had read the book.
Why?
Because the thing is too darn hard to understand. It is filled with truly wonderful gems of wisdom, but good lord you have to work to dig those gems out of it!
It isn’t that the subject is difficult to understand, it isn’t. It is simply that the author compiled it in such a way that it is brutally hard to read it with comprehension and discern his meaning.
If we want people to read our work, it needs to be understandable. Very few will want to fight with a difficult text.
“My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.”
-Ernest Hemingway
By making sure that our words are put down in a way that they will be easily understood, we invite readers into our text.
We can dig out the Style Manual, learn all the rules of grammar. Follow each and every one of them. We can run our work through writing programs on our computers to catch any and all technical errors. We can use technology to polish and polish until our words are perfect and every comma is perfectly placed.
By doing so, we will have polished all of the energy right out of our work. We will have made it dull.
When we do these things, when we follow the rules of writing so rigidly that we reach a sort of computer aided perfection, we remove much that might be interesting from our work.
Obvious errors, misspelling for example, will force a reader out of the flow of the text, so of course must be avoided. But we shouldn’t polish the work so heavily that we’ve removed all of the interesting quirkiness from it. Quirkiness is good!
“We should also attend to things like these, observing that even the incidental effects of the processes of nature have their own charm and attraction. Take the baking of bread. The loaf splits open here and there, and those very cracks, in one way a failure of the baker’s profession, somehow catch the eye and give particular stimulus to our appetite.”
-Marcus Aurelius
Running our text through computer programs in an attempt to fix every possible error removes the humanity, nature, from it. Discards those little failures of the writer’s profession that provide interest.
And if our work isn’t interesting in some way, we are going to be very hard pressed to find people who want to read it.
There you have it.
All I know about writing.
It must be understandable and it must be interesting.
If we can accomplish those two things, readers will want to read it.