TITLE: A Writing Game AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: January 06, 2020 3:13 PM DESC: ----- BODY: I recently started reading posts in the archives of Jason Zweig's blog. He writes about finance for a living but blogs more widely, including quite a bit about writing itself. An article called On Writing Better: Sharpening Your Tools challenges writers to look at each word they write as "an alien object":
As the great Viennese journalist Karl Kraus wrote, "The closer one looks at a word, the farther away it moves." Your goal should be to treat every word you write as an alien object: You should be able to look at it and say, What is that doing here? Why did I use that word instead of a better one? What am I trying to say here? How can I get to where I'm going if I use such stale and lifeless words?
My mind immediately turned this into a writing game, an exercise that puts the idea into practice. Take any piece of writing.
  1. Choose a random word in the document.
  2. Change the word -- or delete it! -- in a way that improves the text.
  3. Go to 1.
Play the game for a fixed number of rounds or for a fixed period of time. A devilish alternative is to play until you get so frustrated with your writing that you can't continue. You could then judge your maturity as a writer by how long you can play in good spirits. We could even automate the mechanics of the game by writing a program that chooses a random word in a document for us. Every time we save the document after a change, it jumps to a new word. As with most first ideas, this one can probablyb be improved. Perhaps we should bias word selection toward words whose replacement or deletion are most likely to improve our writing. Changing "the" or "to" doesn't offer the same payoff as changing a lazy verb or deleting an abstract adverb. Or does it? I have a lot of room to improve as a writer; maybe fixing some "the"s and "to"s is exactly what I need to do. The Three Bears pattern suggests that we might learn something by tackling the extreme form of the challenge and seeing where it leads us. Changing or deleting a single word can improve a piece of text, but there is bigger payoff available, if we consider the selected word in context. The best way to eliminate many vague nouns is to turn them back into verbs, where they act with vigor. To do that, we will have to change the structure of the sentence, and maybe the surrounding sentences. That forces us to think even more deeply about the text than changing a lone word. It also creates more words for us to fix in following rounds! I like programming challenges of this sort. A writing challenge that constrains me in arbitrary ways might be just what I need to take time more often to improved my work. It might help me identify and break some bad habits along the way. Maybe I'll give this a try and report back. If you try it, please let me know the results! And no, I did not play the game with this post. It can surely be improved. Postscript. After drafting this post, I came across another article by Zweig that proposes just such a challenge for the narrower case of abstract adverbs:
The only way to see if a word is indispensable is to eliminate it and see whether you miss it. Try this exercise yourself:
We can specialize the writing game to focus on adverbs, another part of speech, or almost any writing weakness. The possibilities... -----