The root of bad writing?

Writers frequently present me with the following two problems that I suspect have a common cause: they worry too much about words. 1. "Why doesn't this work?" Make sure the words and sentences have muscle. Use the limited amount of time and space to say (or not say) the most you can.

I like the mental exercise of imagining the most impatient critic who is juggling five chainsaws while riding a unicycle across a tightrope with hornets flying around his nose. You want to grab his attention. You can't SCREAM at him because you'll sound like the chainsaws, but you can't mumble because he won't bother straining to hear you. The scream is the gimmicky, hyperbolic, idiom-filled, conspiratorial declaration. The mumble is the wordy, self-referential, disclaimer-filled, hesitant suggestion.

It's a crude analogy, but it works, because it forces you to ask of your sacrosanct writing: Why should your sentence matter more than anyone else's? You do not have the luxury of calling him your friend/colleague/relative/hairdresser, who might have told you your work is great and interesting, honestly. Why should he care? Why should you survive his triage of things that matter? Simple, strong, and efficient writing states the stakes, and gets his attention.

2. Writer's block? When a writer comes to me complaining that he can't articulate the nuance of a brilliant multi-faceted concept, or that this one sentence just isn't working, I often ask him to take his time and talk out loud to me what he wants to say. (Writers can be "she"s, but for the sake of simplicity and not using s/he and his/hers throughout, I'm sticking with "he".) My reason for this relates to Michael Billig's article calling for a re-assessment of the power of "ordinary words," where he says:

By using nouns or verbs in the passive voice, authorities can present their own decisions as if they were objective realities, rather than as actions arbitrarily taken by powerful persons.

Calvin: "I realized that the purpose of Writing is the inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog! Want to see my book report?" // Hobbes: "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes" // Calvin: "Academia, Here I come!"

Too often, when we write, we worry about pleasing our audience or sounding important. It's a sad reality that people genuinely solidify their opinions based on first impressions, or surface appearances, or showy credentials that have nothing to do with the work before them. Practicality forces us to bend to this tendency, but it can freeze good writing. When I'm developing ideas and writing with someone, often they give me a 30-word sentence that would make their vocabulary instructor proud. I simply say, "write down what you just said to me." Then see if the words have muscle and revise.

That's if you're lucky, if the words are merely jumbled and you can't comb through them. Sometimes you're looking at a blank screen or sheet, you have a deadline, and there is nothing you can do. The ink has dried up.

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...in all seriousness, think of the trouble professional authors get into if they must force creativity on demand. There are tons of resources out there with tips on breaking writer's block. My favorites for fiction writers are to imagine the most surprising thing that could happen in a scene or if the scene did not exist. For academic writing, I ask my writer, what do you want the reader to leave this section thinking? What kind of spark or action or motivation or perspective do you want to create? Think not in terms of the information you want to deliver, but the short- and long-term impact you want to make. The answer is often over-ambitious, but it gets the gears turning, so that the writer can start jotting down related word clouds and figure out what information s/he actually does want to deliver.

Earlier in the post, I suggested that the root problem is that many writers worry too much about words. They worry about words so much, they forget to think about the ideas, even though many of them have brilliant ideas. To borrow Calvin's words in the comic above, "inflat[ing] weak ideas" is what often happens when you neglect reasoning and clarity, and all you get is an empty shell that cannot hold up to posterity. I jokingly warn people that I'll "Gertrude Stein" whole paragraphs, a reference to a (probably apocryphal) story that Gertrude Stein crossed out all the adjectives in Ernest Hemingway's manuscript when she was giving him feedback. One good reason for a "fresh pair of eyes" is not because you can't spot mistakes anymore, but because sometimes, your familiarity with the text can prevent you from cutting words that really need to go. Someone new with no investment and who is not best friends with that great phrase on page 8 realizes it has no business in your essay and will strike it. It'll be a cleaner and better piece, and maybe you can use it somewhere else. Think of it as going to a better place. After all, you're writing. You're not building the kitchen sink.

Required reading: George Orwell explains good writing better than anyone has and possibly ever will in his essay, "Politics and the English Language". Randall Monroe's ambitious exercise explains a space project using only the 1000 most frequently-used words in Up Goer Five.

Postscript: Yes, I know the ending two phrases to this piece are self-indulgent. Ironically, I'm not a very good writer, but among the precious few things I am unabashedly proud of are my editing skills. Also, none of the above is to be construed as professional advice. Every writer and piece has different needs at different stages and levels of detail.