When I started this whole blogging-every-day thing, I decided the rule had to be 500 words written in a day. And I meant to hold myself to writing 500 words somewhere in the writing day, whether it was my blog post or the novel I was working on, or a combination of both. I followed that rule religiously through more than 1,500 blog posts and five first draft novels. I found it easier and easier to surpass 500 words on a daily basis. There are all sorts of bits of time available and I collect ideas faster than a rich kid generates empty candy wrappers. The more I call on the well of words for more words, the more words are available. Now, it seems, writing only 500 words is the trick.
I suppose I have become an Old Man of Words. I know both the rules and the exceptions.
Knowing that I can write more than 500 words easily, then the question becomes, why don’t I? Well, the cardinal rule is “Say it short. Say it simple. And say it sweet.” That rule can generate a lot of wonderful writing, full of juicy ideas that splash with flavor when you bite into them. Ernest Hemingway knew that rule. Every poet knows it. Readers generally prefer the easily accessible idea expressed with elegance.
Now, I also have to admit a guilty pleasure in perpetrating purple paisley prose. That is the style of writing in which I generally write convoluted sentences with complex ideas that fold back in on themselves and over-use alliteration to criminal degrees. Charles Dickens liked to do that with descriptive details. Paragraphs about the boarding schools of London, the streets filled with child chimney sweeps and flower girls, and dingy mind-dulling workhouses could take up two or three pages per paragraph. And two pages further on, he layers more details on the same setting. Piles and piles of words and wordplay fill the pages of William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. And if you haven’t read at least something from each of those gentlemen, you will never know what you are missing. But you can prune your paragraphs like a greenhouse master florist with limited space will do to his orchids, and you can actually end up fitting great beauty and powerful content into something even more limited than a 500-word essay. In fact, if you take your ideas and distill them, and keep distilling them, over and over, you will eventually have pared the words down into poetry.
So, there you have it. The reason my essays are about 500 words. This one is four hundred and forty-one words.
Catch a Falling Star 
How To Write A Mickian Essay
I know the last thing you would ever consider doing is to take up writing essays like these. What kind of a moronic bingo-boingo clown wants to take everything he or she knows, put it in a high-speed blender and turn it all into idea milkshakes?
But I was a writing teacher for many years. And now, being retired and having no students to yell at when my blood pressure gets high, the urge to teach it again is overwhelming.
So, here goes…
Once you have picked the silly, pointless, or semi-obnoxious idea you want to shape the essay around, you have to write a lead. A lead is the attention-grabbing device or booby-trap for readers that will draw them into your essay. In a Mickian essay, whose purpose is to entertain, or possibly bore you in a mildly amusing manner, or cause you enough brain damage to make you want to send me money (this last possibility never seems to work, but I thought I’d throw it in there just in case), the lead is usually a “surpriser”, something so amazingly dumb or off-the-wall crazy that you just have to read, at least a little bit, to find out if this writer is really that insane or what. The rest of the intro paragraph that is not part of the lead may be used to draw things together to suggest the essay is not simply a chaotic mass of silly words in random order. It can point the reader down the jungle path that he or she can take to come out of the other end of the essay alive.
Once started on this insane quest to build an essay that will strangle the senses and mix up the mind of the reader, you have to carry out the plan in three or four body paragraphs. This is where you have to use those bricks of brainiac bull-puckie that you have saved up to be the concrete details in the framework of the main rooms of the little idea-house you are constructing. If you were to number or label these main rooms, this one you are reading now would, for example, be Room #2, or B, or “the second body paragraph”. And as you read this paragraph, you should be thinking in the voice of your favorite English teacher of all time. The three main rooms in this example idea house are beginning, middle, and end. You could also call them introduction, body, and conclusion. These are the rooms of your idea house that the reader will live in during his or her brief stay (assuming they don’t run out of the house screaming after seeing the clutter in the entryway).
The last thing you have to do is the concluding paragraph. (Of course, you have to realize that we are not actually there yet in this essay. This is Room C in the smelly chickenhouse of this essay, the third body paragraph.) The escape hatch on the essay that may potentially explode into fireworks of thoughts, daydreams, or plans for something better to do with your life than a read an essay written by an insane former middle school English teacher at any moment, is a necessary part of the whole process. This is where you have to remind them of what the essay is basically about, and leave them with the thought that you want to haunt them in their nightmares later. The last thing that you say in the essay is the thing they are the most likely to remember. So you need to save the best for last.
So, here, finally, is the exit door to this masterfully mixed-up Mickian Essay. It is a simple, and straightforward structure. The introduction containing the lead is followed by three or four body paragraphs that develop the idea and end in a conclusion that summarizes or simply restates the overall main idea. And now you know why all of my former students either know how to construct an essay, or have several years left in therapy sessions with a psychiatrist.
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