EASY READING IS DAMN HARD WRITING

Glad you’re here. My new book on writing made the bestseller list, so now I’m an expert, right?

Writing isn’t magic. No one’s born talented. Exactly like plumbing, gardening, driving, and emptying the dishwasher, writing is explored by apprenticing and doing it.

My wife and co-author, Anne Lamott, might tell you that she became a writer because it’s the one career that indulges her favorite pastime, reading. Once she decided to make a living at writing, so she could read more, she bore down on it with the steadfast grind that she had learned as a masterful tennis player (Canadian under-16 doubles champion 1969).

A continent apart (she was raised in California, me in Virginia), we read the same books and harbored the same authorial hopes. I bore down on it starting in my 20s as a newspaper reporter.

Magical writing is sleight-of-hand. Mostly it’s taking observations and filling them with fictional words that have the ring of precision like the tiny triangle’s vibration peeking out of the orchestra.

When I write about anything — my common topics are the inner critic and spirituality, and now writing itself — it’s only because something’s caught my attention. I use writing to explore my interests, refine my understandings, research my blind spots, and collect it all into a rational, economical blather. Only then can I drop that interest and find another one.

So I don’t know where this newsletter will take me.

Also, I like to plug my retreats and the app I thought up that accompanies Annie’s and my little book, Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences. It’s an app that looks at your sentences and instead of rewriting them itself, flags weaknesses, lets you know why what you’ve got could be improved, and leaves it up to you to make a change. Or not. You can check it out here: goodwriting.app.