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.
- Choose a random word in the document.
- Change the word -- or delete it! -- in a way that improves
the text.
- 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:
- Take any sentence containing "actually" or "literally" or
any other abstract adverb, written by anyone ever.
- Delete that adverb.
- See if the sentence loses one iota of force or meaning.
- I'd be amazed if it does (if so, please let me know).
We can specialize the writing game to focus on adverbs,
another part of speech, or almost any writing weakness. The
possibilities...
-----