Tongue in Cheek
10 billion tips: to becoming a better writer
There are a lot of writing tips out there, but here’s a comprehensive
list from someone who’s been ‘there’. Like a heaping dish of chewy meat,
you should take them with a grain of salt.
 1
- DON’T TAKE THESE TIPS WITH A GRAIN OF SALT! That was a trick, to
see if you fall for the glittering allure of trite aphorisms.
2 - Avoid figurative language, like my stupid simile above.
How dumb did that sound?
3 - Avoid alliteration.
4 - Write by hand. Or on a computer. Or on a typewriter. Or in
your own blood on the dried bark of an Aspen tree. Just get those words
on the Page! (Page is my first pit/lab mix—I Sharpied my first short
story onto his left flank.)
5 - READ articles about writing. READ articles about writing.
READ MORE articles about writing.
6 - Write every day with no exceptions. Unless your head kinda
hurts; then you get a pass. Your head should be in tip-top shape.
(That’s where your brain is, and you CANNOT write without your brain.)
7 - If you’re having trouble getting started, then try doing
another task that you’ve been meaning to get to, like cleaning your
desk, curating the plastic bags under your sink, scrubbing your tile
with an old toothbrush, or watching that part in Forrest Gump where they
scrub tile with an old toothbrush.
8 - Write what you know! The back of the Cheez-It box, the
Facebook statuses of your friend’s girlfriend... as Oscar Wilde once
said, “Be yourself—everyone else is already taken.” And as the Cheez-It
box said, “ENRICHED FLOUR (WHEAT FLOUR, NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, THIAMIN
MONONITRATE [VITAMIN B1], RIBOFLAVIN [VITAMIN B2], FOLIC ACID), SOYBEAN
AND PALM OIL WITH TBHQ FOR FRESHNESS, SKIM MILK CHEESE (SKIM MILK, WHEY
PROTEIN, CHEESE CULTURES, SALT, ENZYMES, ANNATTO EXTRACT FOR COLOR),
SALT, CONTAINS TWO PERCENT OR LESS OF PAPRIKA, YEAST, PAPRIKA OLEORESIN
FOR COLOuR, SOY LECITHIN.”
9 - Experiment with fonts. Especially if what you wrote was
kind of stupid—it might look cooler/smarter in a serif.
10 - Try writing at different times of day—like when you’re
supposed to be at the dentist, a good friend’s birthday party, or your
wedding. Nothing is more important than writing. NOTHING.
11 - Subscribe to literary magazines. Then, when you throw
them away unread every month, you’ll feel firsthand the crushing reality
that every written word is eventually forgotten and ignored!
12 - Grammar matters. But it’s also boring and hard to learn.
So find one of those annoying, Type A automatons who know the difference
between an “em dash” and a “semicolon” to look over your work and fix it
for you. Don’t worry about paying them—the sadism of fixing your
freewheeling mistakes will be recompense enough for those adult virgins.
You’re an ARTIST. You shouldn’t have to worry about that nitty gritty
crapola. Was there supposed to be a hyphen between nitty and gritty?
13 - TRICKED AGAIN—it don’t matter!
14 - Trust your gut.
15 - REVISE! Your gut is a derivative hack.
16 - Still stuck? Take a trip to The Container Store! They
have storage solutions for modern living that can get that clutter/bad
writing off your desk.
17- Nine times out of ten, a concise, clear sentence trumps a
meandering, poetic one. Create sentences that glisten like orchids in
the soft Hawaiian spring, blooming like some heartbreaking reminder of
an ancient world, coming to tell you that all, yes, all, will eventually
be lost . . .
18 - Take your time!
19 - It’s a process.
20 - Show, don’t tell.
21 - Structure?!
22 - to 10,000,000,000) Gonna get these to you very soon—just
making some final tweaks before I turn them in because everything isn’t
finished until it’s perfect. Oops that’s a good tip—
23 - Everything you write should be 100% perfect. As Walt
Whitman said, “A perfect writer would make words sing, dance, kiss, do
the male and female act, bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab, steal,
fire cannon, steer ships, sack cities, charge with cavalry or infantry,
or do anything that man or woman or the natural powers can do.” And as
Dave’s Girlfriend said, “What an amaaaaaaaaaazing week: booked my first
catalogue campaign AND the boo got me tulips! The universe truly has
amazing things in store!” And as the Cheez-It box said, “CONTAINS WHEAT,
MILK, AND SOY INGREDIENTS.”
- Funny Woman |
