I Do Not Write Well.
On why playing a solo game of exquisite corpse leads to disjointed essays.
The title of this piece shouldn’t be taken to mean I’m not proud of some—and on especially cheery days most—of the pieces that I’ve written. For whatever it’s worth,1 I received a national student journalism award for my columns last year.
When I say I do not write well, I say it in the same sense that I would say I do not rollerblade well. That is, I may eventually end up at my destination, but the journey is inevitably an uncomfortable one and passersby may receive the impression that something important is worse for wear after the experience.
This feeling of mine has not been much alleviated by significant practice: As a simple statement of fact, I write a lot.
Last summer, I wrote around ten pieces a week while interning for the Alabama Political Reporter, an output likely equivalent to a shorter book in total wordcount. While I was a student columnist for The Crimson White, I wrote a fairly hefty op-ed about every other week despite being neck deep in graduate coursework. That rate did not change much when I became the opinions desk editor. At present, I’m still writing two pieces a week for APR on top of the occasional freelance piece and Substack post as a hopefully competent PhD student.
Writing a lot (mostly) is hardly a characteristic only shared by bad writers of course. Two of my favorites, Jimmy Breslin and Mike Royko, were both “deadline artists.” That is, Harry Siegel aptly described Breslin as “a man who knew he was playing a numbers game and whose work mostly appeared inside of the following day’s fish wrap.” This Substack, its recent unplanned hiatus aside, is meant to be my living homage to the art that newspapers’ frequent deadlines inspired.
ChatGPT also writes a lot though. And my writing process isn’t that dissimilar from those black boxes.
My typical opinion piece begins with either a title or a single fact; one might call these prompts. It then snowballs in size, quickly becoming a considerable agglomeration of facts, quoted snippets, and hyperlinks evenly split between notebooks, Google Docs, and my brain.
Then, once I have my raw material, I doff my researcher’s cap and become—depending on my mood and my subject—a butcher, a surgeon, a modern Prometheus. The process of outlining then comes long after I have already decided what should go in the outline and, having already spent so much time researching, I’m typically loathe to cut a single fact. (To the distress of both my editors and, eventually, myself when I read someone else’s more economical column.)
And as my likening this process to butchery may suggest, it also tends to be more mechanical and practical than artistic. The overwhelming majority of my time drafting any piece is consumed by making sure each sentence does not surprise the reader who has just finished the last one. Perhaps five percent, if that, is actually spent refining my ideas or carving away at beautiful sentences.
Indeed, most of the sentences I’m proud of having “written” came to me entirely unbidden, oft ending up in the final draft essentially unchanged. (This is an experience that tends to occur as I’m on the precipice of sleep, necessitating a blind grasping for the notebook and pen, a flip of the light switch, and the sacrifice of another fifteen minutes of slumber.2)
All that said, it is perhaps to be expected that I remain pleasantly surprised my words have ever seen print. Thankfully, though, the assembly of this piece has also suggested potential ways to write in a markedly less Swedish style. Will I heed my own advice? The world would be better if more men did.
I have now written almost 700 words about the importance of brevity and my own torturous writing process. In order to not further embarrass myself, I shall conclude here.
If you’re interested in reading some articles with less navel-gazing, check these out:
Liza Featherstone on Rep. Al Green’s protest at Trump’s joint address for Jacobin
Christopher Robbins on Andrew Cuomo entering the race for NYC mayor for Hell Gate
Hamilton Nolan on how TSA workers need to respond to the White House trying to scrap their union contract for his Substack
And Josh Marshall on the DOD removing antisegregation clauses from their contracts for Talking Points Memo
For a couple examples of my fairly consistent output the past couple years, look at these recent pieces:
A bit of news about the municipal election results in Tuscaloosa, Ala.
A book review of Schlozman and Rosenfeld’s The Hollow Parties for Democratic Left
And an op-ed about the University of Alabama walking on eggshells around UA YAF
Not much.
This experience repeated itself at least thrice the day I attended RFK Jr’s rally on UA’s campus. As I usually toss or otherwise “lose” my notes, I unfortunately can’t recall exactly which sentences made it into the final op-ed.