Lean Expression

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

— Cicero

The Kansas City Star taught 18-year-old Ernest Hemingway "the best rules I ever learned in the business of writing.”

When Hemingway began as a copywriter at the paper in 1917, The Star's rules demanded brevity: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Eliminate every superfluous word."

With few exceptions, writers before him were masters of verbalism; but with a boost from The Star, Hemingway forged a new, vigorous and modern style of expression.

Lean expression.

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about," Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon, "he may omit things that he knows and the reader will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them."

Hemingway helped his reader not only by omitting superfluous words, but by chaining sensations to emotions, as in this passage from A Moveable Feast illustrates:

"As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans."

That's the "Hemingway style." Frill-free storytelling, uplifted by the compounding of repetition, rhyme, alliteration, stream of consciousness, Biblical and Bachian cadences, and strict avoidance of the flowery, routine and trite—no Latinate words, for example, like "mollusk;" no adjectives like "slippery;" no adverbs like "eagerly;" no clichés like "the world is your oyster;" and no mention of oysters' effect on the libido.

Eloquent, keen and lean.

POSTSCRIPT: Go here for more assessment. And treat yourself to A Moveable Feast. It's free.

Bitched

We are all bitched.

— Ernest Hemingway

It's 1934 and F. Scott Fitzgerald has just published Tender is the Night, his first novel in a decade.

Fitzgerald is out of favor with readers, who are impatient with stories about rich people (it's the height of the Depression, after all).

He's anxious to learn whether Tender is the Night is any good and writes to Ernest Hemingway to ask his opinion.

Hemingway responds by saying the characters in the novel seem like little other than "marvelously faked case histories." He scolds Fitzgerald for "cheating" readers by inventing characters who merely give voice to his own self-pity.

"Forget your personal tragedy," Hemingway says. 

"We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you."

We could use a little of Hemingway's stoicism right now. We're awash in self-pitying writers. 

And why not? 

Self-pity is, as James Fallows says, The American Way.

A current example appears in writer Beth Gilstrap's article "A Monstrous Silence," in the new issue of Poets & Writers.

Gilstrap describes her agonizing efforts to write while attending to her cancer-patient mother-in-law. Needless to say, the writer's art suffers. And oh how it suffers!

The struggle to chauffeur her mother-in-law to the cancer center twice a week overwhelms the dolorous Gilstrap, and she finds writing eludes her. "When you spend so many hours in hopeless environments," she confesses, "it becomes difficult to see the point of continuing to make art."

And art is her raison d'etre, her "identity," her "sense of self." 

Never mind that Mom wears an unreliable IV drip, endure bouts of nausea, keeps getting blood infections, and has to undergo repeat intubations—Gilstrap's art is suffering! 

"I people-please myself damn near out of existence," she writes.

Golly.

To a writer like Gilstrap, I just want to say, "Honey, hate to break the news, but we're all bitched. If you don't believe me, ask Mom."

Forget your personal tragedy. Don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you.

But Hemingway is out of favor, alas; and self-pity, The American Way.

I'm wasting my breath.

Tighten Your Spigot

Be silent for the most part; or say only

what is necessary and in few words.

― Epictetus

A phone call with a salesman this week reminded me why I dislike so many salespeople.

He would not shut up.

What should have been a 10-minute call wound up an hour-long harangue.

Citing the "Golden Ratio," sales coaches advise you to "talk less, listen more." The ratio of talk should be 3:2 in favor of the customer.  

But this guy isn't buying it.

And I may not buy what he's selling—simply because I can't take another drenching.

Worse, he followed the call up with a 600-word email (not including his two attachments). I've yet to read it all.

If only he knew about Star Style.

Ernest Hemingway mastered Star Style in 1917 during a seven-month apprenticeship at The Kansas City Star. It would propel the writer to fame only nine years later.

In a 1940 interview, Hemingway recalled how the paper's city editor taught him to write by demanding adherence to 110 rules. "Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing,'' Hemingway said. 

Foremost among them were three: Use short sentences. Use vigorous English. Eliminate every superfluous word.

Hemingway revered The Star's rules. "I've never forgotten them. No man with any talent can fail to write well if he abides by them."

Hemingway added to the rules one of his own, which in Death on the Afternoon he labeled the "Iceberg Theory."

"The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water," he wrote. 

"If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them."

The Greek Stoic Epictetus, 2,000 years before had urged followers to abide by comparable rules for speaking.

"Be silent for the most part; or say only what is necessary and in few words," Epictetus advised.

"Talk, but rarely, if occasion calls, and never about ordinary things—gladiators or horse races or athletes or feasts; these are vulgar topics; but above all not about men in blame or compliment or comparison. Turn the conversation, if you can, by talking about fitting subjects; but, should you be among strangers, be silent."

If you're prone to saying too much—in person or on paper—consider your audience. Show them some charity. Tighten your spigot. 

Maybe the Golden Ratio should be 9:1 in favor of the customer.

Maybe the gold in the Golden Rule is—silence.

Are You Strong Enough?

Are you strong enough now for a truly big fish?

— Ernest Hemingway

Braveheart, move over.

Kids in Scotland today are Chickenhearts.

Or so a Scottish university thinks.

The University of the Highlands has slapped an ominous "trigger warning" on Ernest Hemingway's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Old Man and the Sea: 

Warning: Contains Graphic Scenes

History and Literature students at the school are now on official notice that Hemingway's novel contains "graphic fishing scenes."

The university said trigger warnings allow students to make "informed choices."

One Hemingway biographer told The Daily Mail, "It blows my mind to think students might be encouraged to steer clear of the book."

A British history professor told the newspaper that all great literature depicts inherently violent pursuits.

"Many great works of literature have included references to farming, fishing, whaling, or hunting. Is the university seriously suggesting all this literature is ringed with warnings?"

Among many classics, the school has also flagged Beowulf, Frankenstein and Hamlet for excessive and graphic violence.

If size matters, Moby Dick will be banned by the school altogether.

Critics have bemoaned the concept of triggers for years, insisting its application advances a dangerous liberal orthodoxy.

What's goose for the gander, triggers are now in favor among far-right Super Moms, who cite them when banning books by Black and gay authors.

From my standpoint, trigger warnings are ridiculous because they retard teenagers' development into adults.

We have enough problems with cultural illiteracy.

We don't need rampant faintheartedness, too.

The Filthiest Word in the Language

Retirement is the filthiest word in the language.

— Ernest Hemingway

Some words should be retired.

Retired is one of them.

Just as we no longer call anyone "colored" or "retarded," we shouldn't call anyone retired.

The word means, to most people, "purposeless."

Hemingway told his biographer and friend, A. E. Hotchner, that retirement was like a terrible death. 

"The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is," Hemingway said. 

"Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do and what makes you what you are, is to back up into the grave."

"Retired" means purposeless: half-dead, half-gone, half-forgotten.

Over the hill. Out to pasture. Lingering about with one foot in the grave.

Retirement, indeed, is the filthiest word in the language.

Short

It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.

—Ernest Hemingway

Some things never change.

Good writing has never changed, even though writing itself has—a lot. 

We have, for example, seen use of the subjunctive (as in, "It's necessary my boss be at the meeting") nearly cease; sentence fragments (as in, "No can do") achieve acceptance; and verb conversions (such as "impact," "onboard," and "minoritize") shake off the stench of barbarism.

But good writing remains unchanged.

Good writing is good, first and foremost, because it's short. It coveys what's essential and leaves out the rest. Readers get the writer's point, because the point is made straightaway. 

And the wisdom in brevity never changes, as Ernest Hemingway once told his editor.

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.

"It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short," Hemingway said. 

"The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics."

Travesty

This disease controls my life.

— Dietrich Hectors

As depicted in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's new documentary "Hemingway," a wartime concussion—one of five he suffered in his time—left the writer with a little-discussed condition: tinnitus. 

Even the documentary fails to discuss it. Hemingway's chronic tinnitus gets one mention in six hours of narration.

Debilitating tinnitus—not just “ringing in the ears,” but buzzing, hissing, whistling, swooshing, and clicking in the ears—afflicts 20 million Americans, according to the CDC.

Who pays attention? 

Almost no one.

But tinnitus, "the perception of sound when no actual external noise is present," drives millions of Americans to despair and leads some sufferers to suicide, even though medical researchers deny a causal connection.

Last month, Texas Roadhouse CEO Kent Taylor killed himself after Covid-19 left him with tinnitus. 

In recent years, tinnitus has led many other distinguished people to end their own lives, including rock musician Craig Gill, management consultant Robert McIndoe, graphic designer Rick Tharp, and industrial engineer Dietrich Hectors (who left a heart-wrenching "farewell letter" on Facebook).

I wouldn't suggest Hemingway's 1961 suicide stemmed from his chronic tinnitus. 

The writer suffered from a mountain of other maladies, including traumatic brain injury, hemochromatosis, and alcoholism. Medically speaking, he was an unmitigated mess. 

But tinnitus could only have worsened his torment.

According to the American Tinnitus Association, when you consider lost earnings, lost productivity, and medical outlays, tinnitus costs the nation $26 billion a year. Yet tinnitus goes unrecognized by Medicare and Medicaid, and federal funds for basic research are paltry—stifling innovation and the chance of a cure.

Last year, the feds spent only $400 million on hearing-related research. In contrast, it just spent $500 million on Covid-19 relief in St. Louis—alone.

How so atrocious an affliction can remain ignored is a travesty.

NOTE: If you suffer chronic "ringing in the ears," contact the American Tinnitus Association for help.

Cleaning the Refrigerator

"Busy does not equal important," Seth Godin says, "Measured doesn't mean mattered."

How much time did you spend today on anything of importance?

The challenge lies in the fact that busyness camouflages procrastination.

Fight back! Here are my 10 tips:

1. Pick at least one important item for completion every day
2. Favor the 20% of items that produce 80% of the results
3. Suppress the "urgent"
4. Start before you feel ready
5. Treat your employer's or client's business as your own
6. Take good notes on paper during meetings
7. Don't answer poorly written emails
8. Wear the same outfit every day
9. Tune out the news
10. Complete a simple task first—and take comfort in the fact that even pros procrastinate

A reporter once asked Ernest Hemingway how he faced the blank sheet every day.

Hemingway said, “First, I clean the refrigerator.”

Thoughts and Prayers

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages.

— Ernest Hemingway

Boulder, Atlanta, Springfield, Midland, Dayton, El Paso, Gilroy, Virginia Beach, Thousand Oaks, Pittsburgh, Annapolis.

Alongside these place names, the abstract words thoughts and prayers are indeed obscene (obscene, adjective, from the Latin ob ("in front of") + caenum ("filth")).

We're embarrassed to hear them any longer. As we should be.

Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms:

"I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice. We had heard them and had read them now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. 

"There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages."

Let's retire thoughts and prayers. Permanently. 

We have heard them now for a long time and can no longer stand to hear them. 

They're words that have become obscene.

10 Books That Have Mattered to Me

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. 

They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

– Anna Quindlen

For better or worse—mostly better—every book you read becomes part of you.

Whether treasure or trash, books can furnish pivotal life lessons.

I've learned profound lessons from trivial books; enduring lessons from ephemeral books; glorious lessons from terrible books.

And, as every reader knows, some books matter more than others: the ones that change your life. 

They startle you, consume you, haunt you, and shape your world.

Here are the 10 books that did that to me:

The Nick Adams Stories. Ernest Hemingway's coming-of-age stories deeply influenced my own coming of age, although I could not be more different from his protagonist Nick Adams. Hemingway's stories showed my teenage self the dark sides of the world that were—and are—kept secret from kids. Suffering. Sacrifice. Cowardice. Ambivalence. Depression. Addiction. Suicide. Rage. Rape. And romantic betrayal.   

Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Walter Kaufman's critical biography of the German thinker drew me into the world of philosophy and "philosophical anthropology." Even though my college professors later told me Nietzsche was "adolescent," I've always liked his naive truth-seeker's attitude. "There is no better soporific and sedative than skepticism," he said.

Catch-22. A high school English teacher assigned our class Joseph Heller's absurdist novel the same year we had to register for the draft. If I needed convincing I was allergic to the military, I didn't need it after reading Catch-22. Only a decade later, when I was working in an ad agency, did I learn that Heller was in fact proud of his service in World War II, and was actually writing about the bizarre goings-on in New York ad agencies.       

The Sound and the Fury. Another high school reading assignment, William Faulkner's surreal novel showed me that the past is never dead; that psychic legacies—your "roots"—shape you indelibly; that racism is unquestionably America's Original Sin; and that all well-off families must eventually rot and decay. For its literary merits and insights into people, I consider this the greatest novel yet written by an American.

Sanity, Madness and the Family. More than Sigmund Freud's, psychiatrist R.D. Laing's books captivated me during my years in college. In Sanity, Madness and the Family, Laing presented eleven case studies of patients with schizophrenia (considered incurable at the time). He concluded from his studies that the patients weren't crazy, their families were. The hospitalized patients were just trying to deal with family pressures. In other words, even insanity is intelligible, if you listen carefully enough.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I took a semester-long course on Ludwig Wittgenstein's 150-page book, the only one published during his lifetime. Beneath its gnomic sentences lies an extraordinary—and quite mystical—worldview. According to that view, it is our language (i.e., our grammar) that lures us to many nonsensical beliefs about the world. But when we confront the world directly, our language stops operating, and those beliefs lose all credibility. In other words, speaking and thinking aren't doing. Doing is clear; it's speaking and thinking about doing that are muddy. "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent," Wittgenstein concludes. 

Being and Time. Martin Heidegger's exhaustive tome furthered my grip on reality. His basic premise simple: being is time. To be human is to exist "temporally," to live out our short stretch between cradle and grave. Being is time and time is finite: it comes to an end with our deaths. If we hope ever to be authentic human beings, we must act not as lifeless robots but as "beings-towards-death" and carve some meaning out of our finitude.

The Centaur. John Updike's charming novel warmed my heart to others like no book I've read. The story concerns a sad-sack science teacher and his disappointed 15-year-old son. The shambling father lives two parallel lives, one as a small-town high-school teacher (a self-described "walking junk heap”) and the other as a centaur. While the teacher is hapless and unremarkable, the centaur is a mighty Olympian god (he's even in love with a goddess, who's also the girls’ gym teacher). Through overhearing townspeople praise his father, the son comes at last to accept his long-suffering father for who he is—without ever learning about his fantasy life as a god.

Meditations. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius' Meditations provided the sort of "self-help" I needed when, at age 40, I finally read the 2,000-year-old book. A Stoic, Aurelius says that serenity only comes by withholding your judgements of people, places and things. Most troubles exist only in the mind, and are worsened by self-importance, overindulgence, and thoughtless drive.

American Pastoral. Philip Roth's fictional account of the precipitous decline of Newark, New Jersey hit closer to home than anything I've read (I grew up next door to the once-bucolic city). Successful Jewish glove-manufacturer "Swede" Levov's world is shattered when his daughter protests the Vietnam War by blowing up a local post office. The fall of Newark from great American city to cesspool vividly parallels Lev's fate as he searches the city for his fugitive daughter.

What books have mattered to you?

HAT TIP: Thanks go to Dan Pink for inspiring this post. I wonder whether he remembers providing a guest post for Goodly nearly 10 years ago?

Listening Hard

Forgotten genius Ring Lardner was a popular satirist of the 1920s, famous for the practice of "listening hard."

He delighted fans by cloning the speech of ball players, barbers, cops and musicians in his newspaper columns, short stories, songs and plays.

Lardner influenced other, better known writers who followed, including Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway and John O'Hara.

"Listening hard" is the secret sauce not only of good writers, but good salespeople, customer service reps, therapists, judges, spouses and parents.

Sadly, most of the time we default to "easy listening," where others' speech functions merely as elevator music during our ride to the top.

We're eager only to listen with the intent to reply, rather than understand, as Stephen Covey noted.

“When people talk, listen completely," Hemingway said. "Most people never listen.”

Nouning

All bad writers are in love with the epic.

― Ernest Hemingway

The English language isn't precious; but it has its charms.

So when self-proclaimed wordsmiths defile it, I get pretty sore.

Among the greatest defilers are consultants.

When they speak, gibberish bursts from their mouths like puss from a boil; and when they write—or, as they prefer, when they "wordsmith"—clear English turns into hooey.

Consultants love, in particular, nouning: deadening verbs by converting them into nouns.

Nouning, they believe, elevates their jejune statements—and justifies their fees.

For example:

We're experiencing a disconnect.

Watch for my invite.

I know a foolproof hack.

That was an epic pivot.

That was an epic fail.

Equally vile are headline writers. 

When they start nouning, you'd better reach for the kidney dish. 

For example:

AMC hoping sales reach $5.2 billion. Here’s why that’s a big ask.

Windows 11 preview: What’s in the latest build?

Dems put divides aside, rally behind Biden.

Need a good eat plan?

Feeling anxious? Declutter your overwhlem.

Nouns like these aren't just pompous. They're nauseating.

"Many of us dislike reading or hearing clusters of such nouns," says wordsmith Henry Hitchens.

"We associate them with legalese, bureaucracy, corporate jive, advertising or the more hollow kinds of academic prose. Writing packed with nominalizations is commonly regarded as slovenly, obfuscatory, pretentious or merely ugly."

Ugly is right.

So I ask—as your consultant—need a solve for this problem?

The next time you encounter a nouner, grab a hammer.

Manual Therapy

It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters. 

— Epictetus

Nothing separates the cowardly and strong like a good pandemic.

In a pinch like today's pinch, we all want to be pillars of strength—to embody Ernest Hemingway's famous formula, "courage is grace under pressure." 

But it takes a strong foundation.

While you're home—if you're home—you can work on your foundation by reading a manual by the first century Stoic Epictetus.

It's aptly titled Manual.

Manual is a short book that's had a long life among resilient people.

And deservedly so. 

Its author was a mensch.

The son of a slave, Epictetus understood suffering. His sadistic master once purposely broke his leg, leaving him crippled for the rest of his life. When he became a freedman in his late teens, he taught philosophy on street corners in Rome, but was banished for his troubles.

Undaunted, Epictetus moved to Greece, where he founded a school that would eventually attract students from all corners of the empire. 

One of those students took shorthand notes during Epictetus' lectures—notes that became Manual.

Epictetus welcomed adversity as training for moments like ours, when courage and resilience are tested. His philosophy gave students the wisdom to "keep calm and carry on" throughout plagues, wars, fires and earthquakes. 

It also taught them to remember we're all interconnected.

It's no coincidence that when the Chinese consumer electronics manufacturer Xiaomi shipped face masks to Italy last week, all the crates were stamped with a Stoic saying:

We are waves of the same sea, leaves of the same tree, flowers of the same garden.

My Morning Ritual

A daily ritual is a way of saying I'm taking care of myself.

— Mariel Hemingway

Like hundreds of millions of people around the globe, I wake up every morning and perform precisely the same task.

I brew coffee.

For me, it's more a ritual than a routine.

A routine, psychologists say, is a more or less meaningless activity, while a ritual is purpose-filled.

Brewing coffee certainly is purpose-filled for me. 

I'd describe its purpose as "to start the day with elation."

Some days, I know, will deliver several moments of elation.

But some days will not.

My morning ritual compensates for that.

It's like an insurance policy that protects me from a ho-hum day.

"It is unrealistic to want to be happy all the time," says alternative medicine advocate Andrew Weil.

He's right, of course.

But doesn't everyone deserve at least one dose of happiness a day, even if it's caffeine-induced?

The morning ritual is a catalyzer of happiness.

It is a homecoming, a refuge, or, in the words of the German philosopher Byung Chul Han, a "technology for housing oneself."

Life coaches and self-help gurus point to the morning ritual as the prime example of "self-care."

It gives you the feeling that you're in control, even if that's for only a few minutes of the day.

Were I more original, I'd invent my own morning ritual, as did many famous people in the past:

• Ben Franklin sat and wrote naked every morning for an hour after rising.
  
  
• John Quincy Adams (also naked) took a dip in the Charles River.
  
  
• Jane Austen woke up every morning and played the piano for an hour.
  
  
• Alexander Dumas began his mornings with a stroll beneath the Arc de Triomphe, where he would stop to eat an apple.

• Marcel Proust woke every day to smoke a bowl of opium and eat a croissant.

• Winston Churchill drank a whiskey and smoked a cigar first thing every morning.
  
  
• Marilyn Monroe drank raw egg yolks in warm milk.
  
  
• Elizabeth Taylor arose to eat bacon and eggs with a mimosa.

Many contemporary celebrities have more imaginative morning routines than mine, as well. 

TV producer Simon Cowell, for example, wakes up every morning and watches Hanna-Barbera cartoons. 

Warren Buffet drinks a can of Coke and reads The Wall Street Journal and USA Today, like clockwork. 

Michelle Obama wakes up at 4:30 and works out in the gym. 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wakes up and drinks water and lemon. "I try to drink it slowly and mindfully,” she told Balance the Grind.

Victoria Beckham wakes up and drinks two tablespoons of vinegar.

Morning rituals are really all about doing one thing that's important to you, no matter what the day may bring.

The hell with the rest of the world, the morning ritual pronounces: this is mine.

As journalist Jess McHugh wrote in The Washington Post in January, morning rituals "provide a feeling of freedom and a rare moment for self-determination."

What's your morning ritual?

Above: The Morning Coffee by Charles Hawthorne. Oil on canvas. 30 x 30 inches.

Lunch-pail Mentality

Playing the game for money produces the proper professional attitude.
It inculcates the lunch-pail mentality.

— Steven Pressfield

You can spot a pro a mile away. She carries a lunch pail.

The dilettante, on the other hand, carries a bag from Pret.

The pro shows up, rain or shine, and works her plan.

She persists.

The dilettante sits and waits—often in meetings—for the Muses (or the cavalry) to arrive.

He resists.

I love the name of conference planner Warwick Davies' company, The Event Mechanic! It perfectly—and authentically—describes Davies' lunch-pail attitude.

Journalist James J. Kilpatrick once likened the professional writer to a carpenter:

Our task is deceptively simple. It is as deceptively simple as the task of carpenters, who begin by nailing one board to another board. Then other boards are nailed to other boards, and, lo, we have a house. Just so, as writers we put one word after another word, and we connect those words with other words, and, lo, we have a news story or an editorial.

Jack London trained himself to write for money by copying other writers' phrases into notebooks, "strong phrases, the phrases of living language, phrases that bit like acid and scorched like flame."

And journalist Hunter S. Thompson trained himself to write for a living by typing for days on end the works of Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

That's persistence.

Downtown

Her breasts jiggled fetchingly, but Larry wasn't fetched.

— Stephen King, from The Stand

A recent radio interview with the author has prompted me to re-read Stephen King's 40-year-old doorstop The Stand. 

On Page 101, I encountered the sentence above: perhaps the worst in all of King's novels; perhaps the worst in American literature.

I have relished reading trash ever since high school, where the Jesuits, hoping to instill in us "catholic tastes," encouraged our indulgence in "middlebrow" literature (after all, they said, Shakespeare aimed to please the groundlings as much as the audience in the seats; and Faulkner supported a family of ten writing short stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mademoiselle and The Saturday Evening Post).

And so I've consumed scores of best-sellers by the likes of Upton Sinclair, John O'Hara, James M. Cain, Henry Miller, Jim Thompson, Philip K. Dick, James Michener, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Herman Wouk, John leCarre’, Robert B. Parker, Ken Follett, James Lee Burke, Henning Mankell, John Grisham, Dean Koontz and, yes, Stephen King.

My teachers understood: reading middlebrow authors would help us appreciate the skills of highbrow ones (authors like Hardy, Conrad, Maughm, Hemingway, Faulkner and Heller).

I adore all those best-selling writers; and, besides, sometimes you need to go downtown to get uptown.

The Mighty Copywriter's New Rule for Gender Marking

Among the "lessons" recited at church on Christmas Eve was the annunciation to the shepherds.

My wife complained on the sidewalk outside about the lesson's loss in euphony.

"Glory to God in the highest," the angel proclaimed, "and on earth peace, good will toward all people."

King James had been neutered.

The inclusive "good will toward all people" sounds wrong for a reason: it's too stately. "Good will toward men"—like a shepherd—is plain and unadorned.

"Prose is architecture, " Hemingway said, "and the Baroque is over."

The King James editorial crew should have let it stand, as the US Navy has sagely done, for example, with "messman," letting it stand over the gender-neutral "culinary specialist."

And so here is The Mighty Copywriter's new rule for gender marking:

If it ain't baroque, don't fix it.

Quiet Desperation

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

― Henry David Thoreau

Last week, Steven Beck, a 61-year-old handyman who lived as a recluse in a foreclosed home in a Washington, DC, suburb, killed his dog and then himself, moments before his house blew up.

His act saddened neighbors, who suspected he was desperate.

Media lures us every hour to celebrate beauty, luxury, mastery, victory.

Self-help gurus tell us, "Professionals are amateurs who didn't quit."

But the Steven Becks tell another story. Some professionals quit, as well.

Vincent van Gogh completed 860 oil paintings and 1,300 watercolors and drawings before he died from a self-inflicted gunshot.

Ernest Hemingway completed 20 books and hundreds of articles and won a Nobel Prize before he died from the same cause.

Hunter S. Thompson completed 15 books and hundreds of articles before he died, once more, from a self-inflicted gunshot.

Thoreau called quitting "confirmed desperation."

If he was right, most of us are desperate; and some of us are confirmed in despair.

The easy success stories are "fake news."

The real news is: the 5 Signs of despair are easy to spot.

Learn what they are.

HAT TIP: Thanks to Susan Rosenstock for her work to raise awareness of the 5 Signs someone needs help. You can help with a donation now.

Lean In

Businesses sink billions into "designing out waste" and "building lean in," but spend nothing to discourage verbosity.

They'd do their bottom lines a big favor by sending every employee the link to John McPhee's latest article in The New Yorker, "Omission."

McPhee clarifies why lean writing is good writing: it's what's left out that counts.

Lean writing comes from heavy editing, which McPhee compares to shortening a train. 

"The idea is to remove words in such a manner that no one would notice that anything has been removed," he says. "It’s as if you were removing freight cars here and there in order to shorten a train—or pruning bits and pieces of a plant for reasons of aesthetics."

Not only editors, but artists, designers and comedians understand that, always, less is more.

Hemingway called it the Iceberg Theory:

"If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.”