Tag Archives: writing advice

November 11, 2025 · 1:53 am

Giving and Taking Stupid Advice

Let’s begin with some stupid advice. I don’t have time to write a lot today because the Princess is ill and must go see the doctor in Plano.  So the advice is; Set aside time for writing and always allow plenty of time for it.  You will probably notice already that I am giving you advice that I am not taking myself this morning.  So don’t follow that advice.  It is stupid advice.  I have given it to creative writing classes for years and thought I meant it.  But looking back on real life, I realize, it has never been true for me.  My best ideas, my best writing, always seem to come in the middle of the pressure-cooker of daily struggle and strife.  I have battled serious illness for most of my adult life.  I have the luck of a man who tried to avoid letting a black cat cross his path by crashing his bicycle at the top of a hill covered in clover with only three leaves each and then rolling down the hill, under a ladder, and crashing into a doorpost which knocks the horseshoe off the top.  The horseshoe lands on my stupid head with the “U” facing downward so the luck all drains out.  Bad things happen to me all the time.  But it makes for good writing.  Tell me you didn’t at least smile at the picture I just painted in your mind.  You might’ve even been unable to suppress a chuckle.  I am under time pressure and misfortune pressure and the need to rearrange my entire daily schedule.  So it is the perfect time to write.

Val in the Yard

This essay, however, is about bad advice.  And I am a perfect person to rely on as a resource for bad advice.  I am full of it.  Of course, I mean I am full of bad advice, not that other thing we think of when someone tells me I am “Full of it!”  So here’s another bit of writing advice that is probably completely wrong and a bad idea to take without a grain of salt, or at least a doctor’s prescription.   You should stop bird-walking in your essay and get to the damn point!

 I know a lot about the subject of depression.  When I was a teenager, I came very close to suicide.  I experienced tidal waves of self-loathing and black-enveloping blankets of depression for reasons that I didn’t understand until I realized later in life that it all came from being a child-victim of sexual assault.  Somehow I muddled through and managed to self-medicate with journal writing and fantasy-fixations, thus avoiding a potentially serious alcohol or drug problem.  This is connected to my main idea, despite the fact that I am obviously not following the no bird-walking advice.  You see, with depression, Bad advice can kill you.  Seriously, people want to tell you to just, “Get over it!  Stop moping about and get on with life.  It isn’t real.  You are just being lazy.”

I have been on the inside of depression and I know for a fact that not taking it seriously can be deadly.  In fact, I have faced suicidal depression not only in myself, but in several former students and even my own children.  I have spent time in emergency rooms, mental hospitals, and therapists offices when I wasn’t myself the depression sufferer.  One of my high school classmates and one of my former students lost their battles and now are no longer among the living.  (Sorry, have to take a moment for tears again.)  But I learned how to help a depression sufferer.  You have to talk to them and make them listen at least to the part where you say, “I have been through this myself.  Don’t give in to it.  You can survive if you fight back.  And whatever you have to do, I will be right here for you.  You can talk to me about anything.  I will listen.  And I won’t try to give you any advice.”  Of course, after you say that to them, you do not leave them alone.  You stay by them and protect them from themselves, or make sure somebody that will do the same for them stays with them.  So far, that last bit of advice has worked for me.  But the fight can be life-long.  And it is a critical battle.

So taking advice from others is always an adventure.  Red pill?  Green pill?  Poison pill?  Which will you take?  I can’t decide for you.  Any advice I give you would probably just be stupid advice.  You have to weigh the evidence and decide for yourself.  What does this stupid essay even mean?  Isn’t it just a pile of stupid advice?  A concluding paragraph should tell you the answer if it can.  But, I fear, there is no answer this time.

Leave a comment

Filed under artwork, autobiography, battling depression, commentary, compassion, Depression, empathy, healing, insight, Paffooney, sharing from YouTube, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as , , , , ,

September 5, 2024 · 1:34 am

K.I.S.S.

10569084_1454667924794105_6407184127897264675_n

When learning to write, you have to learn the rules.  And then you start writing, and you learn that you have to break all the rules to do it well.  But what do I know?  You have to be pretty desperate to get your writing advice from a Mickey.  After all, it’s not like Mickey was a writing teacher for over thirty years… oh, wait a minute… yes, he was.

Okay, so I decided to write today about the K.I.S.S. rule of writing.  That’s right, Keep It Simple, Stupid.  Other writing teachers tell me it should be, Keep It Simple, Sweetie, because you can’t say “stupid” to a kid.  Okay, that’s mostly true.  But I use “stupid” when I use the rule myself.  I’m talking to Mickey after all.

So, I better stop “bird-walking” in the middle of this essay, because “bird-walking”, drifting off topic for no purpose, is the opposite of keeping it simple.

I try to write posts of no more than 500 words.  I write an introduction that says something stupid or inane that speaks to the theme I want to talk about.  Then I pile in a few sentences that talk more about the theme and do a good job of irritating the reader to the point that they can’t wait to get to the conclusion.  Finally I finish up with a really pithy and wonderful bit of wisdom to tie a knot in the bow of my essay.  I save that bit for the end as a sort of revenge for all the readers who don’t read all the way to the end, even on a short post like this one.  Of course, I could be wrong about how wonderful and pithy it is.  What does “pithy” even mean?  It can be like the soup in the bottom of the chili pot, thicker and spicier than what came before… or possibly overcooked with burned beans.

That was another bit of “bird-walking”, wasn’t it?  See, you have to break the rules to make it work better.

So, in order to keep it simple, I guess I need to end here for today.  Simple can be the same thing as short, but more often you are trying to achieve “simple and elegant” and pack a lot of meaning and resonance into a few lines.  And I, of course, am totally incapable of doing that with my purple paisley prose.  And there’s the knot in that bow.

Leave a comment

Filed under goofy thoughts, humor, insight, strange and wonderful ideas about life, writing, writing humor, writing teacher

Tagged as , , , ,

May 8, 2024 · 12:20 am

Notes from the 70’s; the Master Plan

I have wanted to be a writer and cartoonist from childhood onward.  I didn’t really begin in earnest until the last few years of my teaching career with retirement looming directly ahead.  Now I have made the leap off the cliff.  I retired a year ago.  I did everything short of bankruptcy to put my accounts in order, and transformed myself into a starving artist.  I have a full retirement from Texas, subject to a grandfather clause (no relation to the Santa Clause) that allows me to receive enough money to live on for the rest of my life (thanks to the trick of being a teacher back before George W. Bush and Rick Perry came along to pillage Texas education and reduce what they pay those lazy, lousy teachers for their lifetimes of service).  Of course, I must try to limit my expenditures as much as possible, because… well, it is a teacher’s pension.

Norwall

But my plan from the 70’s, begun in high school and carried out through college and my teaching career has allowed me to stay on track to create something massive and complex.  My story ideas have been collected over time and are all based on a very simple rule… “Everything is connected.”  Every story I now labor to put into prose mentions other stories and has story fishhooks in it to catch readers and pull them into something else.  Most of my work is set in farm-town Iowa in the 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s.  I made them all a part of the 20th Century on purpose because the personalities the characters are all based on were a part of my life then.  Certain elements run through all the stories.  Let me explain a few.

1.  Some characters appear in many stories (sometimes as a main character, and more often as a supporting character.  The French boy who sings karaoke beautifully and makes his cousin’s bar business a success by entertaining people there appears in two stories that happen at about the same time.  Both of those stories are still waiting to be written.  Tim Kellogg appears in my stories from the time he is but a twinkle in his parents’ eyes until he becomes the leader of the infamous boys’ gang of liars called the Norwall Pirates.

Crooner

giant bat2.  Most of the stories are centered around members of the Norwall Pirates.  They are a group of small town boys dedicated to adventure, telling lies, and seeing girls naked.  Much of the magic, science fiction, fantasy elements, and just plain hallucinations in my stories are the fault of boys who tell stories and lies so well that sometimes they believe them themselves.

3.  Character arcs that begin in one book will often continue in another.  Sometimes I go back in time and explain something that happened much earlier.  The Pirate’s club first appears in my novel Catch a Falling Star set in 1990.  The origin of the club is told about in Superchicken, a novel I have blogged about, but not yet published.  That story happens in 1974.  Valerie Clarke is introduced in the novel PDMI Publishing LLC is currently working on, Snow Babies,  which takes place in Winter of 1984.  She is the leader of the Pirates in the finished, but not yet submitted novel The Bicycle-Wheel Genius.  That story spans 1988 to 1991.

peterlie

4. Much of my nuttiness was originally created in the 1970’s.  Even though the stories were given a setting much later, all the illustrated Paffoonies I have dropped into this post were drawn in 1977 and 1978.  I keep these cartoon character model sheets in one of my magical tomes, the Norwall Book, a loose-leaf binder full of drawings and junk carefully preserved in plastic page-protector sheets.

So, this is all the proof that my leap off that cliff into retirement will either make a very big splash or hit the rocks very hard.  It will be very something.  And I hope to live to see it… especially to get all of the stories I can possibly finish written and published… with a ghost of a hope that my own drawings, cartoons, and illustrations will count for something.  So, now my plan is revealed.  Let the enemies plan their counter-moves, and may the devil not move the water at the bottom of the cliff.

1 Comment

Filed under humor, novel plans, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

January 24, 2024 · 1:41 am

Reading Other Writers

20180103_073738

Nobody who wants to be a writer gets by with just writing and never reading anything by anybody else.  It is too easy to devolve into some kind of human mushroom that way, thinking only thoughts a mushroom could think, all fungus-like and having no chlorophyll of their own.  You never learn to decode other people and other people’s thinking if you don’t read other people’s thoughts crystallized in writing.

And not every other writer is Robert Frost.  Or even Jack Frost who thinks he’s  Gene Kelly.  There has to be some interpretation, some digging for understanding.  What did that writer mean when she said political correctness was like a tongue disease?  And what does it mean when a commenting troll calls me a nekkid poofter?  Is that how he spells “exceptional genius”?  I think it is.  Trolls are not smart.

20180103_082315

I know people have to make an effort to understand me.  When I write, I am writing under the delusion that I can produce literary quality off the top of my head.  In fact, I can barely produce hair off the top of my head, and it is gray when I do it.   See what I did there?  It is the kind of joke a surrealist makes, pretending the idiomatic expression you use is to be taken literally when it doesn’t literally make sense.  That kind of nonsense is what my readers have to put up with, and probably also the reason why most of them just look at the pictures.  If you have to think too hard when you read, your brain could over-heat and your hair could catch fire.  I like that kind of purple paisley prose that folds back in on itself and makes you think in curlicues.  But most people don’t.  Most people don’t have fire-proof hair like I do.

20180103_082404 Of course, there is the opposite problem too.  Some writers are not hard to understand at all.  They only use simple sentences.  They only use ideas that lots of other people have used before.  You don’t have to think about what they write.  You only need to react.  They are the reasons that words like “trite”, “hackneyed”, “boring”, and “cliche” exist in English.  But simple, boring writing isn’t written by stupid people.  Hemingway is like that.  Pared down to the basics.  No frills.  Yet able to yield complex thoughts, insights, and relationships.

20180103_082341

Sometimes, it doesn’t even take a word to make the point.  For instance, why, in the picture, is Fluttershy trying to drink out of the toilet in the dollhouse bathroom?  For that matter, why does a doll house even need a bathroom?  Applejack doesn’t even fit in that yellow bathtub.  I know.  I tried to stuff her in there for this picture.  And, as you read this, doesn’t this paragraph tell you a lot about me that you probably didn’t even want to know?

20180103_082248

When I am reading the writing of others, I am looking for a cornucopia of things.  I want to not only understand their ideas, I want to detect the limping footprints across the murder scene of their paragraphs and come to know the deeper things about them as well.  I spent years decoding and trying to understand the writing of preliterate kids in my middle school English classes in order to be able to teach them to write better.   And I learned that no writer is a bad writer as long as they are using readable words.  I also learned that very few writers are James Joyce or Marcel Proust.  Thank God for that!  And given enough time I can read anything by anybody and learn something from it. I read a lot.  And it may not always make me a better writer to read it, but it always has value.  It is always worth doing.

 

 

1 Comment

Filed under commentary, education, goofy thoughts, humor, irony, photo paffoonies, photos, reading, strange and wonderful ideas about life, surrealism, teaching, wordplay, writing, writing teacher

Tagged as , , , , ,

January 5, 2024 · 2:45 am

Metaphor and Meaning

Image

 

In this week’s Paffooney remix, I have pictured the little boy crooner Francois Martin on the main street of Norwall.  Why have I done such a foolish thing?  Why have I drawn a boy singing silently a song that only I can hear in my silly old head?  In fact, why do I label them Cantos instead of Chapters?  Of course, the answer to these rhetorical questions is metaphorical.  I look at my writing as being poetry, or, more accurately, as music rather than mere prose.  It is a metaphor central to my being, writing is putting the inner music of my mind down on paper.

Here is a secret to powerful writing.  Connect ideas with metaphors.  A metaphor is a direct comparison of two unlike things to create an analogy, an echo of an idea that gives resonance to a notion.  Sorry, I’m an English teacher.  It’s in my genes.  But metaphors can serve as the essential connections, as glue to put paragraphs and scenes together.

Let me show you a metaphor.  Here is a short poem, the natural environment where many metaphors live;

                                                The Cookie

Once I had a cookie… But every time I took a bite, It became smaller and smaller…

                With each bite I had less and less cookie left.

But when it was gone, the sweet taste of it…

                Lingered on… as memory.

 

The central metaphor of this poem is comparing the cookie to my life.  I am getting older.  I have six incurable diseases, some of them life threatening.  I have been thinking about mortality a lot lately.  So what is the point of the poem?  That even when the last bite is taken, and there is no more cookie… when I am dead, there is the memory of me.  Not my memory.  The memory of me in the minds of my family, my children, my students, and other people who have come to know me.  That memory makes whatever goodness that is in me worth living for.

Okay, a metaphor explained is kinda like a bug that’s been dissected for a science fair.  Its innards are revealed and labeled.  The beauty is gone.  It’s kinda icky.

What works better, is a metaphor that the readers can readily grasp on their own.  The beauty has to be discovered, not dissected and explained.  Let me try again;

 

                                                The Boy and the Boat

                The boy looked to the horizon where wild and wooly white-caps roiled upon the sea.

                “Lord help me,” he said, “the sea is so large, and my boat is so small…”

 

I can hear what you are thinking.  “That’s too simple and ordinary.  If it’s a metaphor, then it’s a really stupid one.”  Well, I heard someone thinking that, even if it was not you.

Let me add a bit of information to help you connect things as I do.  When I was ten years old, a fifteen-year-old neighbor boy sexually assaulted me.  I told no one.  I was so devasted by the event that I repressed the memory until I reached the age of twenty two.  In high school, my suicidal thoughts and darkest depressions were caused by this event even though I couldn’t even recall.  To this day I have not explained to mother and father what happened.  I can only bring myself to tell you now because my abuser died of heart failure last summer.  It was a life event of overwhelming darkness, pain, and soul scorching.  Now look at “The Boy and the Boat” again.  Has the meaning changed for you the way it does for me?

Now, I know that the last paragraph was a totally unfair use of harsh reality to make a point about metaphor and meaning.  So let me give you one last poem… a sillier one.  You can make of it whatever you will;

 

                                                The Grin

The wrinkly, bewhiskered old man

Had a smile like a plate of moldy spaghetti

In the afternoon sun.

 

2 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

November 13, 2023 · 2:04 am

Giving and Taking Stupid Advice

Let’s begin with some stupid advice. I don’t have time to write a lot today because the Princess is ill and must go see the doctor in Plano.  So the advice is; Set aside time for writing and always allow plenty of time for it.  You will probably notice already that I am giving you advice that I am not taking myself this morning.  So don’t follow that advice.  It is stupid advice.  I have given it to creative writing classes for years and thought I meant it.  But looking back on real life, I realize, it has never been true for me.  My best ideas, my best writing, always seem to come in the middle of the pressure-cooker of daily struggle and strife.  I have battled serious illness for most of my adult life.  I have the luck of a man who tried to avoid letting a black cat cross his path by crashing his bicycle at the top of a hill covered in clover with only three leaves each and then rolling down the hill, under a ladder, and crashing into a doorpost which knocks the horseshoe off the top.  The horseshoe lands on my stupid head with the “U” facing downward so the luck all drains out.  Bad things happen to me all the time.  But it makes for good writing.  Tell me you didn’t at least smile at the picture I just painted in your mind.  You might’ve even been unable to suppress a chuckle.  I am under time pressure and misfortune pressure and the need to rearrange my entire daily schedule.  So it is the perfect time to write.

Val in the Yard

This essay, however, is about bad advice.  And I am a perfect person to rely on as a resource for bad advice.  I am full of it.  Of course, I mean I am full of bad advice, not that other thing we think of when someone tells me I am “Full of it!”  So here’s another bit of writing advice that is probably completely wrong and a bad idea to take without a grain of salt, or at least a doctor’s prescription.   You should stop bird-walking in your essay and get to the damn point!

 I know a lot about the subject of depression.  When I was a teenager, I came very close to suicide.  I experienced tidal waves of self-loathing and black-enveloping blankets of depression for reasons that I didn’t understand until I realized later in life that it all came from being a child-victim of sexual assault.  Somehow I muddled through and managed to self-medicate with journal writing and fantasy-fixations, thus avoiding a potentially serious alcohol or drug problem.  This is connected to my main idea, despite the fact that I am obviously not following the no bird-walking advice.  You see, with depression, Bad advice can kill you.  Seriously, people want to tell you to just, “Get over it!  Stop moping about and get on with life.  It isn’t real.  You are just being lazy.”

I have been on the inside of depression and I know for a fact that not taking it seriously can be deadly.  In fact, I have faced suicidal depression not only in myself, but in several former students and even my own children.  I have spent time in emergency rooms, mental hospitals, and therapists offices when I wasn’t myself the depression sufferer.  One of my high school classmates and one of my former students lost their battles and now are no longer among the living.  (Sorry, have to take a moment for tears again.)  But I learned how to help a depression sufferer.  You have to talk to them and make them listen at least to the part where you say, “I have been through this myself.  Don’t give in to it.  You can survive if you fight back.  And whatever you have to do, I will be right here for you.  You can talk to me about anything.  I will listen.  And I won’t try to give you any advice.”  Of course, after you say that to them, you do not leave them alone.  You stay by them and protect them from themselves, or make sure somebody that will do the same for them stays with them.  So far, that last bit of advice has worked for me.  But the fight can be life-long.  And it is a critical battle.

So taking advice from others is always an adventure.  Red pill?  Green pill?  Poison pill?  Which will you take?  I can’t decide for you.  Any advice I give you would probably just be stupid advice.  You have to weigh the evidence and decide for yourself.  What does this stupid essay even mean?  Isn’t it just a pile of stupid advice?  A concluding paragraph should tell you the answer if it can.  But, I fear, there is no answer this time.

2 Comments

Filed under artwork, autobiography, battling depression, commentary, compassion, Depression, empathy, healing, insight, Paffooney, sharing from YouTube, strange and wonderful ideas about life

Tagged as ,

September 9, 2023 · 12:40 am

K.I.S.S.

10569084_1454667924794105_6407184127897264675_n

When learning to write, you have to learn the rules.  And then you start writing, and you learn that you have to break all the rules to do it well.  But what do I know?  You have to be pretty desperate to get your writing advice from a Mickey.  After all, it’s not like Mickey was a writing teacher for over thirty years… oh, wait a minute… yes, he was.

Okay, so I decided to write today about the K.I.S.S. rule of writing.  That’s right, Keep It Simple, Stupid.  Other writing teachers tell me it should be, Keep It Simple, Sweetie, because you can’t say “stupid” to a kid.  Okay, that’s mostly true.  But I use “stupid” when I use the rule myself.  I’m talking to Mickey after all.

So, I better stop “bird-walking” in the middle of this essay, because “bird-walking”, drifting off topic for no purpose, is the opposite of keeping it simple.

I try to write posts of no more than 500 words.  I write an introduction that says something stupid or inane that speaks to the theme I want to talk about.  Then I pile in a few sentences that talk more about the theme and do a good job of irritating the reader to the point that they can’t wait to get to the conclusion.  Finally I finish up with a really pithy and wonderful bit of wisdom to tie a knot in the bow of my essay.  I save that bit for the end as a sort of revenge for all the readers who don’t read all the way to the end, even on a short post like this one.  Of course, I could be wrong about how wonderful and pithy it is.  What does “pithy” even mean?  It can be like the soup in the bottom of the chili pot, thicker and spicier than what came before… or possibly overcooked with burned beans.

That was another bit of “bird-walking”, wasn’t it?  See, you have to break the rules to make it work better.

So, in order to keep it simple, I guess I need to end here for today.  Simple can be the same thing as short, but more often you are trying to achieve “simple and elegant” and pack a lot of meaning and resonance into a few lines.  And I, of course, am totally incapable of doing that with my purple paisley prose.  And there’s the knot in that bow.

Leave a comment

Filed under goofy thoughts, humor, insight, strange and wonderful ideas about life, writing, writing humor, writing teacher

Tagged as , , , ,

January 1, 2023 · 3:45 am

Wrestling with Themes

Image

I recently was advised by a fellow blogger to offer a few writing tips on my blog as a way to painlessly market my writing.  Okay, I’m a writing teacher, so I can do that.  But in my own writing I have hit a snag.  Yes, there are things much, much bigger than my humble skill as a writer.

My current novel project, the Bicycle-Wheel Genius has grown into a science-fiction monster.  It is not only about a scientist who has secret government connections, but about time travel and people changing into rabbits… or rabbits into people… or boys into girls… dogs and cats living together…   No, that is Ghostbusters. 

But it has reached a point where the most important theme is incredibly clear and difficult to deal with.  The theme I find myself weaving into this story is;  “All men are basically good.”   Gongah!  Wotta theme to try to write!  Do I believe it?  Of course I do.  Can I put the story together in such a way that  I illustrate it to the reader’s satisfaction?  Of course I can’t.  So what do I do?  This story has some of the best villains and evil people in it that I have ever written.  I can’t kill them off to solve the story’s plot problems (Well, I can, but I don’t want to).  I have to show how evil can be redeemed.

My cast of characters include the scientist himself, calmly dealing with time travelers, invading aliens, government assassins, and a group of young boys known as the Norwall Pirates.  There is a time traveler who appeared in a book within a book in my novel Catch a Falling Star.  There is also an alien space navigator who has been shot by a local Iowa Deputy Marshall and stranded on Earth.  Another character is an artificial man, an automaton who has been crafted as a government assassin made from alien technology.  Okay, I know you don’t believe I can make serious science fiction out of such crazy-quilt characters, especially with a primary theme like the one I’ve claimed.  So, I have to confess that it is not serious in any way, shape, or form.  It is a silly fantasy comedy.

So, how do I generate a theme as big and bold and important as the goodness of all men?  Well, here’s a secret recipe;

  1. Take one genius who has lost all the people he loves and has to start over with new friends and, eventually, new family.
  2. Add a brother-in-law with mental health issues and financial dependency.
  3. Add a group of young boys hungry for adventure and new experiences and a little bit short on common sense.
  4. Add a paranoid evil government that has secrets it will kill to protect (the factual part of the story).
  5. Mix well.
  6. Add vinegar.
  7. Boil at 350 degrees for a year.

Of course, if you thought I was giving you real writing advice, then SURPRISE!  It turns out I have been making it all up as I go along.  That’s how you do it.  You write and write, knit it all together tenuously, and then edit the heck out of it, hoping to make sense of the whole thing.

1 Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

September 6, 2022 · 1:53 pm

K.I.S.S.

10569084_1454667924794105_6407184127897264675_n

When learning to write, you have to learn the rules.  And then you start writing, and you learn that you have to break all the rules to do it well.  But what do I know?  You have to be pretty desperate to get your writing advice from a Mickey.  After all, it’s not like Mickey was a writing teacher for over thirty years… oh, wait a minute… yes, he was.

Okay, so I decided to write today about the K.I.S.S. rule of writing.  That’s right, Keep It Simple, Stupid.  Other writing teachers tell me it should be, Keep It Simple, Sweetie, because you can’t say “stupid” to a kid.  Okay, that’s mostly true.  But I use “stupid” when I use the rule myself.  I’m talking to Mickey after all.

So, I better stop “bird-walking” in the middle of this essay, because “bird-walking”, drifting off topic for no purpose, is the opposite of keeping it simple.

I try to write posts of no more than 500 words.  I write an introduction that says something stupid or inane that speaks to the theme I want to talk about.  Then I pile in a few sentences that talk more about the theme and do a good job of irritating the reader to the point that they can’t wait to get to the conclusion.  Finally I finish up with a really pithy and wonderful bit of wisdom to tie a knot in the bow of my essay.  I save that bit for the end as a sort of revenge for all the readers who don’t read all the way to the end, even on a short post like this one.  Of course, I could be wrong about how wonderful and pithy it is.  What does “pithy” even mean?  It can be like the soup in the bottom of the chili pot, thicker and spicier than what came before… or possibly overcooked with burned beans.

That was another bit of “bird-walking”, wasn’t it?  See, you have to break the rules to make it work better.

So, in order to keep it simple, I guess I need to end here for today.  Simple can be the same thing as short, but more often you are trying to achieve “simple and elegant” and pack a lot of meaning and resonance into a few lines.  And I, of course, am totally incapable of doing that with my purple paisley prose.  And there’s the knot in that bow.

Leave a comment

Filed under goofy thoughts, humor, insight, strange and wonderful ideas about life, writing, writing humor, writing teacher

Tagged as , , , ,

May 13, 2022 · 2:07 pm

K.I.S.S.

10569084_1454667924794105_6407184127897264675_n

When learning to write, you have to learn the rules.  And then you start writing, and you learn that you have to break all the rules to do it well.  But what do I know?  You have to be pretty desperate to get your writing advice from a Mickey.  After all, it’s not like Mickey was a writing teacher for over thirty years… oh, wait a minute… yes, he was.

Okay, so I decided to write today about the K.I.S.S. rule of writing.  That’s right, Keep It Simple, Stupid.  Other writing teachers tell me it should be, Keep It Simple, Sweetie, because you can’t say “stupid” to a kid.  Okay, that’s mostly true.  But I use “stupid” when I use the rule myself.  I’m talking to Mickey after all.

So, I better stop “bird-walking” in the middle of this essay, because “bird-walking”, drifting off topic for no purpose, is the opposite of keeping it simple.

I try to write posts of no more than 500 words.  I write an introduction that says something stupid or inane that speaks to the theme I want to talk about.  Then I pile in a few sentences that talk more about the theme and do a good job of irritating the reader to the point that they can’t wait to get to the conclusion.  Finally I finish up with a really pithy and wonderful bit of wisdom to tie a knot in the bow of my essay.  I save that bit for the end as a sort of revenge for all the readers who don’t read all the way to the end, even on a short post like this one.  Of course, I could be wrong about how wonderful and pithy it is.  What does “pithy” even mean?  It can be like the soup in the bottom of the chili pot, thicker and spicier than what came before… or possibly overcooked with burned beans.

That was another bit of “bird-walking”, wasn’t it?  See, you have to break the rules to make it work better.

So, in order to keep it simple, I guess I need to end here for today.  Simple can be the same thing as short, but more often you are trying to achieve “simple and elegant” and pack a lot of meaning and resonance into a few lines.  And I, of course, am totally incapable of doing that with my purple paisley prose.  And there’s the knot in that bow.

Leave a comment

Filed under goofy thoughts, humor, insight, strange and wonderful ideas about life, writing, writing humor, writing teacher

Tagged as , , , ,