Pity the Poor Reader

Chapter 1

Alas, poor reader

Alas, the poor reader. Ever pelted with a heavy rain of words. Junk mail and Spam, E-mail and blogs; E-zines and streaming news. Preached at and scolded, befuddled and misled.

Tortured with unpronounceable words and bored with cliché. Is it any wonder that people grow ever weary of reading?

I undertook this book not just to help aspiring writers, but to help myself and my dwindling brethren: We who still love words. For us, few joys surpass a sentence that moves one to tears or laughter. That's true whether it's found in a book, a magazine, a song, on a blog or over a urinal.

Such love borders on sickness. It's a disease I intend to spread. I aspire to be a one-man epidemic. If I can help raise a better crop of wordsmiths, then we poor readers may have more that’s worth reading.

That said, this book is neither grammarian nor manual. I'm afraid you'll find it of little use if you’re looking to learn the difference between a colon and semicolon, the nominative and objective case. There are plenty of such tomes gathering dust in the back shelves of bookstores and libraries.

Instead, consider this slender volume a rapier. Wield it to cut through the trope and drudgery that dulls most writing today. It’s a pirate’s manifesto on writing well, an un-textbook.

What, pray tell, does that mean?

It means this book is a philosophy in the 18th-century meaning of the word. Think of Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” John Stuart Mill’s “Principals of Political Economy” or Sun Tzu’s “Art of War.” All of the above embodied more than their particulars: stagecraft, economics and war. “Know you the enemy and know yourself,” Sun Tzu counseled Chinese generals, “and you will fight a hundred battles without defeat.”

Sun Tzu’s adage is as much attitude as military strategy. So, too, is writing. It’s neither job nor career. To write well you must learn how to think like a writer. This book, then, is a way of perceiving the world.

Writing well is also a way of living. Like Sun Tzu’s ancient Chinese warriors, writers are fighters, too. They live to slay ignorance and misconception, fabrication and pretense.

It’s a fight anyone can wage. Writers have long come from all walks of life. George Orwell served the British Imperial police in Burma and India. Victorian novelist Benjamin Disraeli was elected twice as Prime Minister during the height of the British Empire. Cao Xueqin, the author of Chinese classic “A Dream of Red Mansions,” was a disgraced bureaucrat in the Qing dynasty. Cervantes fought against the Turks. And Thomas Paine, probably our most famous essayist, taught school, collected taxes and served as a privateer. The lesson here is that you don’t have to call yourself a writer to know how to write well.

This is also a book of illusions. Writing, if nothing else, is the art of deception. Sincerity of purpose, I’m afraid, is never enough. Readers have to be tricked into not only reading your work but believing in what you write. Within you’ll find a useful bag of tricks.

As any skilled illusionist knows, you can’t deceive an audience without first seeing the world through its eyes. You must sit in the lowliest of seats, eating stale popcorn. Writers struggle to empathize with readers, not judge them. Nor do they preach. As Claudius says in Robert Graves’ novelization of his life, writers “compel men to truth.” That is, they don’t cherry pick the facts that fit their moral assumptions; they try to portray the world as it is, warts and all.

If you learn to pity the poor reader, your writing will sing. And if your writing sings, readers will sing your praise.

Then again, even if you sing like a canary, who will hear you at a time when so few are listening? In other words, giving the waning interest in reading, why bother to learn how to write well?

It’s a fair question - with a Machiavellian answer: It’s in your own best self-interest to do so. No matter what profession you choose - law, medicine, accounting, astrophysics or prestidigitation - writing well will help you to stand out.

Look at any field. Most of the top people write and speak well. Examples include Oliver Sacks in psychiatry, Stephen Hawking in physics, James Grant in finance, Paul Krugman in economics and Doris Kearns Goodwin in history.

Take David Card, a labor economist at UC Berkeley who examined the 1980 Cuban refugee crisis in Miami. In 13 pages, Card skewered the conventional wisdom that illegal immigrants drive unemployment up and wages down. His terse paper also punctured the academic balloon that quantity of words equals quality of thinking.

Why do the best struggle to make their ideas understood by all? Here's how Nobel Physicist Richard Feynman, a prolific author and one our greatest scientists, answered this question: "If you can't explain something to a six-year-old, you really don't understand it yourself." What excuse, then, can there be for you - and anyone else - not to struggle to make themselves understood if our greatest minds, trying to answer with the most difficult questions, are doing so?

Thinkers such as Card and Hawking understand one of the great ironies of our time: The more there is to read, the less there is that’s worth reading.

Editors and publishers despair at finding people who can be heard above the din of clacking keyboards and blackberries, cellphones and PDAs. People who can write material that's not only entertaining but engaging.

Anyone can blog or email. Only a few can do so in a way that commands attention, draws an audience. Says Brian Sugar, who runs a network of blogs called Sugar Inc., “It’s actually really hard creating compelling content that brings an audience.”1 A mere 10 percent of blogs garner nearly 90 percent of all readers. Write well and you'll be in high demand, a canary among crows.

It’s taken me years of hard practice, but I’ve finally mastered how to befuddle my students. Within the first minutes of any new class I never fail to leave them flummoxed.

The secret to my success: I greet every student with a sizable hunk of rock candy. It’s not for eating, mind you; it’s for contemplation. Behold your candied quartz, I tell my class, and consider this question: Why is writing like rock candy?

Confused? Good. Now you’re ready to learn how to write well. I require all my students to be confused, even lost. They must set sail from the safe harbor of their assumptions, of what they believe to be true. Only in unchartered waters can real learning take place.

I’m afraid that there aren’t any cute videos or computer games, with their singing cartoon characters, to soften the hard work of learning to write. The basic lessons are darn hard to sink your teeth into, let alone digest. Compensation comes later in the sweet satisfaction of having mastered something difficult, like completing a marathon.
Starting to see why learning to write well is like eating rock candy?

Writing well is hard because it’s a balancing act of the highest order. You’re trying to arrange words in a way that’s clear yet pleasing to the ear, meaningful yet entertaining. Mozart called this the golden mean of truth: Artistic expression that’s sophisticated yet accessible.

Few things are harder to achieve. Even the great Mozart struggled. Here’s what he once wrote his father in frustration: “In order to win applause one must write stuff which is so inane that a coachman can sing it, or so unintelligible that is pleases because no sensible man can understand it.”

You’ve probably begun to wonder. “Okay, so this guy can quote Mozart, but what does he really know about writing?” Now you’re starting to think like a writer.

Allow me to present my credentials. What qualifies me to talk so high and mighty about writing is years of failure. Sure, I’ve had my share of success, writing a couple of novels and scores of high-profile stories in national publications such as the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and Business Week magazine.

But the peaks of my career pale in comparison to the valleys. It’s slogging uphill that teaches you how to think and, better yet, how to think for yourself. Writing is nothing but thinking in its purest form.

In the ups and downs of my career, I’ve had the privilege of rubbing shoulders with some of our best writers. I filled notebooks with random bits of their advice and tested it out in my own writing. Some of it worked, most of it didn’t. It's the stuff that didn't work that egged me on to try and make sense out of the craft of writing.

Lao Tzu didn't invent Taoism. He did, though, give it meaning. This wandering Chinese philosopher gathered up, sorted and compiled the disparate wisdom of a dozen scholars and priests. His i Ching, or book of changes, has influenced thinkers around the world for two millennium.

This book is no i Ching, but Lao Tzu is my inspiration. Little here is original to me. Rather, I've attempted to spin the disparate threads of wisdom gathered over 25 years into whole cloth.

The lessons of this book are agnostic. They apply whether you want to write news, magazine stories, memoirs, blogs or even fiction. The book, however, uses journalism as the classroom through which to understand the basics of writing well.

Agnostic as well is my intended audience. This book is written for anyone who wants to improve their writing, whether age 15 or 50. You're never too old to be a student. At 51, I began studying Chinese. I guess you're never too old to be foolhardy, either.

This book is assembled from four interlocking conceptual blocks:

• Think Like a Writer
• The Tao of Writing Poorly
• The Art of Brevity
• Difficulties be Damned

The first block lays the philosophical foundation of my method. It illustrates that writing well is as much attitude, the way you live and perceive the world, as craft. The next block lays bare the common mistakes and misconceptions that hobble most beginners. Its designed to encourage readers to laugh at how little they know about writing and how poorly they’ve been taught about it. You can’t start to improve until realizing how little you understand. That realization sets you up for the third block, which explains the techniques of our best writers. The fourth block illustrates the importance of gathering meaningful information to write about. Writing and research or joined at the hip. You can’t write well unless you have good stuff to write about.

I’ve included several cheat sheets as addendum. One lists words that are sure to deaden anything you write; another is a list of words sure to enliven your writing. Lastly, there is list of common mistakes, which I call the “Un-Commandments.” Feel free to cut and paste any of these lists to the top of your laptop, your writing journal or your forehead.

That said, this book works best when read from start to finish. My technique won’t make much sense until you understand its philosophical underpinnings. Nor does it make much sense to just read the book's opening philosophy. What’s the point of it if there’s no practical application? Nor can you write well if you skip the section about how to gather information or meaningful detail. It takes silk to spin fine cloth. And research and reporting are the silk of great writing.

I do try to keep the book short, in the spirit of less is more. And I try my darnedest to make the lessons entertaining, using my own experiences and those of other writers as comic relief.

Any writer worth his Puma sneakers has stumbled time and again.

Learning to write is slapstick comedy. Feel free to laugh at your own stumbling, first steps. A self-deprecating sense of humor helps ease the inevitable bruises suffered in the long journey of learning how to write well.

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