Write Like You Mean It
I think I’ve mentioned before how much I like Heather Havrilesky. She’s one of those writers with such an inherently funny, relaxed voice, she could make pocket lint sound interesting. She could write about data warehousing applications and it would be like taking a shower with an angel. I’ve been reading her TV column in Salon for years, even though I don’t have a TV and hardly ever see the shows she writes about. Her blog posts fill me with envy at their casual brilliance and wit.
My job involves writing about data warehousing applications, which mostly means I have to think up a lot of synonyms for “clicking” (eg. pressing, selecting, choosing, activating, and so on.) It can be kind of deadly, so one thing I do to amuse myself is whenever I’m writing a section where I have to describe logging in or creating a user or whatever, the generic username I create is “Bob Dobbs” (or “bdobbs”), the Church of the Subgenius’ messiah of slack. It’s my little inside joke; I’ve been doing it for years. Once I noticed another technical writer using “John Zorn” (“jzorn”), so I guess I’m not the only one.
I know it’s a trick; it’s not really casual brilliance. Heather’s, I mean. No doubt she works super hard to write as well as she does, and I’ve tried to pay attention. I recently looked up a couple of her old posts about the writing process:
Use your critics for good, not evil. Some say you should kill your inner critics, but I suspect you have tens of thousands of critics in your head, many of whom are the authors of that “amazing insightful and amusing shit” of which you speak. Kill the critics and you mute your own voice. Instead, herd those critics into a bar and get them drunk. Send some of them to the grocery store and see what they have to say. Tie some up and make them eat nothing but black olives and watch nothing but movies starring Mel Gibson for an entire week. Make some of the others read your bike trip notes. What do they think about your experience? Do they think you’re a shriveled-up little poser? Their thoughts should be included in your bike trip journal, or else your voice will be far too self-censoring and blandly positive to be remotely interesting. If half of you hates you, you’d better let that half have a voice, too, or you’ll wind up with a very small, weak, fake-sounding voice in your writing, with the implied, muffled, angry voices hidden just out of sight, but not disguised enough that the reader can’t see them. Readers enjoy writers who admit to every side of themselves, who can see around things. Readers dislike feeling that a writer has blind spots and defensive stances.
This other one is what I was originally looking for. It’s quite long and mostly aimed at someone who wants to be a professional freelance writer, but it also has a lot of great general advice on what makes for interesting writing:
5. Nurture an irrational overconfidence in yourself and your ideas. OK, so you don’t want to just be a capable writer, you want to be a brilliant writer. In my opinion, writing talent is one part mimicry, one part bluster, and one part original perspective. Capable, less-talented writers only have the mimicry part mastered. They mimic – I don’t mean that they directly copy other writers, although some do. I mean that capable writers write by digesting volumes of decent writing and then attempting to form sentences similar to the sentences they’ve read. This is part of what any writer does, mind you, but it’s the only thing on board for the capable, not-incredibly-talented writer.
Now, the vast majority of writers, ranging from capable to good, have both the mimicry and the bluster down pat. In other words, most writers are just overconfident hacks who know how to mimic and know how to silence that internal voice of doubt when it comes up. They choose to believe that they’re good at what they do and that they have something to say, something to share with the world. They build their skills by writing a lot and reading a lot, and they build their confidence by telling themselves that they’re just as good at writing as anyone else in the world. Some of these writers, for example, like to talk about the fact that Dave Eggers is overrated. That’s one of their favorite subjects. Dave Eggers makes them feel very confident in themselves. They try not to compare themselves to Jonathan Franzen, on the other hand.
The thing is, Dave Eggers may or may not be overrated, but he definitely has the three elements of a brilliant writer: 1) mimicry 2) bluster, and 3) an original perspective. Maybe Eggers’ books have included lazy chapters that ramble and go nowhere, but when he’s on, like he is in the chapters of his novel/memoir that deal with his parents’ death, it’s quite clear that he has talent as a writer. He’s a capable writer, first of all, which means he’s a capable mimic. He’s also got loads of confidence, which is crucial. And finally, he has an original perspective. He’s full of weird ideas, he has an odd take on things, he’s very sensitive but very defensive – all elements that happen to add up to really solid, entertaining, original writing.