Writing, Clear and Simple

Cultivate observation and reflection, a pair of habits that will help add life—zip, zing, music, poetry, and Pow!—to your writing.

As I was dressing one morning, I began musing on an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies that I saw recently. Jed Clampett’s nephew, Jethro, had been thinking about what profession he wanted to pursue, when he met a magician. He was enthralled by the magician’s tricks—pulling coins out of thin air and making them disappear, or magically baking a cake in a top hat—so he decided that he was going to be a magician.

Naturally, this being Jethro Bodine, he thought that all he needed to do was buy the magician’s equipment and clothing, and he too would be a magician. Even if you’ve never seen the show, you can guess how well that idea worked out: Just as well as his attempt to become a “double-nought spy” a la James Bond.

It struck me then that Jethro isn’t all that different from many people we meet every day. For example, Steve Farber has talked about how the fashion of wearing baggy pants got started among skateboarding enthusiasts, not because they thought it looked cool, but because they usually wore knee-pads beneath their pants. It was initially a functional choice; they had to wear baggy pants to fit them over the knee pads.

But then the guys who hung out with the real skateboarders decided they wanted to look like the cool guys they were hanging out with, so they started wearing big baggy pants too. They wanted to look like skateboarders, without actually doing the work of becoming skateboarders. And the word for this kind of person is “poser.”

All this—thinking about Jethro wanting to be a magician, to thinking about Steve Farber’s story about posers dressing like skateboarders, to thinking about how people often try, like Jethro, to become something by taking on the appearance but not doing the work required to really be that thing—happened within a few moments while I was getting dressed. But none of it would have happened if I hadn’t been engaged in those two habits: observation and reflection.

I was observing what was going on around me. I saw the television show, I heard Steve Farber’s story, and I see examples of posers all round, both in the media and a few examples in my own life. The key here is that I see these things and take note of them. And I hould emphasize here that I’m trying to build the habit of literally taking note. Watch what goes on around you and write things down. If you don’t write things down, you will not remember more than a tiny fraction of your observations. (Unless you’re some sort of Rainman-type savant who remembers everything.)

Then reflect on what you’ve observed. Ask yourself questions about things. How is a sitcom episode like something you’ve experienced? Why do some stores have handles on the doors that look like you should push them, when you really need to pull them, or vice-versa? Why is this thing the same as or different from that thing? How do they make these? Who decided this? Where? How? When? What if?

There’s no way of knowing when or how you’ll use these observations to make or reinforce a point in your writing. But you will use them, if you cultivate the habit.