I knew when I took the shot this morning it would be a triggering moment for Sawsan who swoons over Sparrows.
Then I posted the shot on Instagram. In seconds, a text message comes flying in: “POST the Sparrow, PLEASE.”
Then message alerts won’t stop: Ping Ping Ping Ping Ping PING. PING. She lights up my inbox after I ask her to share a few thoughts on why I should post the picture.
I was a bit taken back — she said ‘PLEASE‘ vs. the customary JUST-DO-IT. Finally, a wee bit of control over Her on Something. I feel such joy over this…
Then she shares a passage from Thoreau in ‘Walden‘: “I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.”
I re-read the passage, and thought about the summer afternoon when the kids and I went to Cove Island Park. I had Birdie (our Sun Conure) on my shoulder — and, the kids were a least one hundred yards behind me, belly crawling in the grass, nope, don’t know him, never saw him before in our life.
… And that’s one of the arguments for writing well — for taking the time and summoning the focus to do so. Good writing burnishes your message. It burnishes the messenger, too.
You may be dazzling on your feet, an extemporaneous ace, thanks to the brilliant thoughts that pinball around your brain. There will nonetheless be times when you must pin them down and put them in a long email. Or a medium-length email. Or a memo. Or, hell, a Slack channel. The clarity, coherence, precision and even verve with which you do that — achieving a polish and personality distinct from most of what A.I. spits out — will have an impact on the recipients of that missive, coloring their estimation of you and advancing or impeding your goals.
If you’re honest with yourself, you know that, because you know your own skeptical reaction when people send you error-clouded dreck. You also know the way you perk up when they send its shining opposite. And while the epigrammatic cleverness or audiovisual genius of a viral TikTok or Instagram post has the potential to shape opinion and motivate behavior, there are organizations and institutions whose internal communications and decision-making aren’t conducted via social media. GIFs, memes and emojis don’t apply.
When my friend Molly Worthen, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a frequent contributor to Times Opinion, took the measure of the influential diplomat Charles Hill for her 2006 book “The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost,” she noted that a principal reason for his enormous behind-the-scenes influence was his dexterity with the written word. He took great notes. He produced great summaries. He made great arguments — on paper, not just on the fly.
Worthen noted in her book that “transmitting ideas into written words is hard, and people do not like to do it.” As a result, someone who performs that task gladly, quickly and nimbly “in most cases ends up the default author, the quarterback to whom others start to turn, out of habit, for the play.”
Good writing announces your seriousness, establishing you as someone capable of caring and discipline. But it’s not just a matter of show: The act of wrestling your thoughts into logical form, distilling them into comprehensible phrases and presenting them as persuasively and accessibly as possible is arguably the best test of those very thoughts. It either exposes them as flawed or affirms their merit and, in the process, sharpens them.
Writing is thinking, but it’s thinking slowed down — stilled — to a point where dimensions and nuances otherwise invisible to you appear….
I think you can take the “pen and paper” out of the equation — replace them with keystrokes in a Google Doc or Microsoft Word file — and the point largely holds. That kind of writing, too, forces you to concentrate or to elaborate. A tossed-off text message doesn’t. Neither do most social media posts. They have as much to do with spleen as with brain.
What place do the traditional rules of writing and the conventional standards for it have in all this? Does purposeful, ruminative or cathartic writing demand decent grammar, some sense of pace, some glimmer of grace?
Maybe not. You can write in a manner that’s comprehensible and compelling only or mostly to you. You can choose which dictums to follow and which to flout. You’re still writing.
But show me someone who writes correctly and ably — and who knows that — and I’ll show you someone who probably also writes more. Such people’s awareness of their agility and their confidence pave the way. Show me someone who has never been pressed to write well or given the tutelage and tools to do so and I’ll show you someone who more often than not avoids it and, in avoiding it, is deprived of not only its benefits but also its pleasures.
Yes, pleasures. I’ve lost count of the times when I’ve praised a paragraph, sentence or turn of phrase in a student’s paper and that student subsequently let me know that the passage had in fact been a great source of pride, delivering a jolt of excitement upon its creation. We shouldn’t devalue that feeling. We should encourage — and teach — more people to experience it.
I hit a low point today. I felt I could not go on. It was like knowing that a free garden, calm and full of rest, lay on the other side of a wall. I knew where the gate was, I could walk through it whenever I felt like it. I was withholding release from myself. Then I had a coffee and a cake, went back to the desk, forced a solution, and kept going.
Portrait via Inside Story. “Garner Territory” by Zora Simic: “In one of the most remarkable entries, in the thick of torment, Garner envisions a new life for herself… “Sometimes we know what we want even when we think we want something else.” Another friend declares, “I think these diaries are the best thing she’s ever written.” I agree; they are her life’s work, and the ideal mode for a “writer who works off and is nourished by the events of daily life.” •
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
As you embark on something like this, as you comb through the years, you are confronted with something like an identity parade of former selves. Here they come, shuffling into the white room, in front of the black horizontal bars, all dressed differently (up until around the age of 40 at any rate), all with slightly different haircuts, different ideas about the world, all awkwardly taking their place in the line-up and squinting at the two-way glass. Aspects of all these personas have been jettisoned along the way to get you to whoever you are now. The Usual Rejects. Some of these old versions of you will be more familiar than others, but, for most of us, they will all be shuffling around twitchily to some degree or other. Guilty. How do you rate these old selves? Look back ten or fifteen or twenty years. What was that guy like? How would you rank them in the pantheon of former selves? […]
But, still, here they both are, next to each other in the line-up, squinting into the glare, taking their turn stepping forward – ‘OK, you deadbeats. Start talking.’ Some of them you just want to fetch a mug of tea for. To roll out the good cop, the guy who will say, ‘Hey, you were young, don’t be too hard on yourself kid.’ But there are others, the real offenders, who you want to grab by the lapels and scream, ‘Are you kidding me with this shit?’ You want to reach back through the years and drag them down to the cells, where you will turn off the recording equipment and get busy with the rubber pipe and the rolled telephone book.
Because that’s what it feels like to me, the memoir. A forced confession.
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
“I’m a bookseller. That’s what I do,” she says, when I remind her we are supposed to be discussing her own new novel, Tom Lake. “I’m obsessed with other people’s books.”
To say that Patchett is evangelical about books is no mere cliche. In one of her essays, she compares her zeal to that of a Hare Krishna devotee she met many years ago who spent every day proclaiming his love of God to strangers in Chicago airport. “I would stand in an airport to tell people how much I love books, reading them, writing them, making sure other people felt comfortable reading and writing them.” …
With her focus on love and marriage, and some sort of redemption however serious the subject matter, she is at odds in today’s climate of angsty millennial fiction. “I am a glass-half-full, can-do kind of gal. It’s just the salt in my brain,” she admits cheerfully. “So, people give me grief about being too hopeful or too cheerful or too interested in family – it doesn’t matter. I’m not writing all the novels… Continue reading “I am a glass-half-full, can-do kind of gal. It’s just the salt in my brain.”→
