TT 494: Writing Advice

(feel free to ignore this one, although the Sarah Deming essay linked at the end is good)

Many are joining Substack. It’s great. Blogging is back! I love the blogosphere, especially the arts blogosphere.

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As Substacks have proliferated, so have essays on “How to write Substacks.” This can be a tiresome chorus, for most arts education is bunk. Emulate who you admire is the only truly important rule, but even that rule gets broken, for many major stylists deliberately hide influences on the way to a finished aesthetic.

Still, I keep seeing mistakes that I used to make. For whatever it’s worth, here are a few minor precepts that I’ve acquired the hard way:

1. Do not write yourself as the protagonist. Whenever I have had a proper magazine editor, the first thing they have done is taken out all my personal asides. Ben Ratliff, who wrote hundreds of reviews on deadline for The New York Times, told me, “Don’t explain and don’t complain.” The audience knows who they are reading, and even if they don’t, you still have to honor that old-school maxim, “show, don’t tell.” Conversation is different: In conversation, we hem and haw and bitch and emphasize our personal stories. But writers earn the reader’s trust by showing mastery of the topic, not by telling anecdotes that offer context about why they should be reading. (See Footnote.)

2. Eliminate introductions. My wife Sarah Deming is a great writer and a great editor, and the first thing she always did in my early days was cut the first few paragraphs. This rule is pure magic. Try it and see.

3. The reader is never as interested as the writer, so don’t include everything you know. From the late Terry Teachout, who — like Ratliff — also wrote countless pieces on deadline. Be nimble. Cut, cut, and cut some more. Just because you thought of it doesn’t mean you need to write it. Thank your subconscious for sharing, then ignore the suggestion and move on.

4. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” This spurious quote attributed to Einstein is a good thing to keep in mind. Yes: cut. But nonetheless: tell the truth. Don’t get into the weeds trying to reduce something that just can’t be reduced. Sarah also likes to say, “Let chronology be your friend.” If I am worried about getting it done, I sometimes just write down the facts — as simple as possible, but not simpler — and the chronology. Afterwards, the way forward is usually clear.

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These rules don’t suit every situation. Personal essays are a different topic, not to mention serious fiction engaged in building polyphonic literary landscapes.

My suggestions are intended for those who are celebrating the world of the arts on Substack or another blogging platform. This activity is important. Nobody is coming to save us. Those that care are in a small lifeboat together.

To build readership, link to others, and make nice comments on other people’s posts.

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David Foster Wallace wrote plenty of paragraphs — obviously! — but he always had more to say. Footnotes gave him an out. After he was done with his luminous paragraphs, those wonderful long DFW footnotes could include lists and funny bits and whatever else that couldn’t be worked into the main text.

Lists and footnotes are a good way to keep a Substack going.

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The post you are reading now was directly inspired by “The Blind Spot: On Rita Bullwinkel's Headshot" by Alex Perez in The Metropolitan Review. However, when attempting to tease out a grand essay, the walls started to close in. No good. I deleted my first block of text and quickly wrote basic rules as the list above, while saving the original generative idea as a

Footnote. Alex Perez’s recent takedown of Headshot is valuable, but it is also a perfect example of a critic including themselves as a protagonist for no good reason. He tells us (at length) about his youthful experiences trying to be a boxer. None of this is unique or that interesting, and there was only just enough literary flair for me to continue into the terrific review proper, where Perez shows us he has sufficient mastery to ruthlessly pan a book universally hailed as great. While I haven’t read the book, I suspect he’s right — but I would trust Perez’s comments even more if he hadn’t wasted time offering personal anecdotes. Again, as Sarah Deming taught me, “discarding the introduction” can work wonders, and in this case a good editor would have cut Perez’s first three paragraphs. And, hey, rather than getting bogged down with name-checks up top, Perez could have included an annotated list of his favorite boxing books as a sidebar or footnote to his review.

Footnote to a footnote: Sarah Deming’s personal essay “Street Fights” is what Perez is trying to do in his first three paragraphs, but better and (much) funnier.