Clarity, honesty, and commanding the Union army

Are you allowed to notice that you are confused?

It’s a well-known dictum, worth repeating, that writing out your ideas is one of the best ways to think. It enforces clear thinking. 

An unexpected, to me at least, role model for clear writing and thinking: Ulysses S. Grant. Josh Marshall, reviewing Grant’s memoirs, argues that Grant’s clear writing —and thus his clear seeing and thinking—was essential to his military genius:

I’ve given a lot of thought to where this came from, Grant’s skill and insight. Humility and deliberateness are more constant themes of his writing than daring or aggression. The answer must rest in clarity, an ability to see all the different factors in a military situation (which are not only military but tied to morale and a larger political context) and an ability to act on that ability to see and comprehend all of the moving parts. This must all be tied to the quality of his writing which, as I noted, is even more unexpected than his generalship.

The essence of all good writing is clarity. Style seems like a separate attribute of good writing. But it’s not. Style is really just a byproduct of clarity and concision. It is the personality or other uniqueness of the writer coming through on the page because they write clearly.

So, how does one write clearly? Marshall’s take is that good writing is mostly about good thinking: “Once you know precisely what you mean to say, writing it is usually straightforward if not always easy. At least 90% of poor writing stems from the writer not knowing exactly what it is they mean to say.”

Grant writer

But good thinking is easier said than done. One surefire way to not know what you mean to say is to actively lie to yourself about it, as Sasha Chapin has argued:

I find that people often believe they have a writing technique problem, when, actually, what they have is a sincerity problem. They think that writing is onerous, when, actually, they mean that writing as if they’re someone else is onerous. If you’re not the kind of person who actually cares much about writing an epic fantasy novel, then no matter how much you think you ought to write an epic fantasy novel, it won’t feel good. This doesn’t mean never tailoring your writing to your audience, it just means that you should shape who you are into a palatable format, rather than gussying up who you’re not.

The remedy is simple, although it does involve a short, sharp shock of frankness with oneself. Stop lying about who you are, and write the things that are actually inside you. If, deep down, you want to write about misunderstood teen gymnasts with pet magic lions, your literary fiction about sad suburbanites will not easily come out of you, and it will probably not come off well.

Sasha’s upshot: “If you have writer’s block, maybe you should stop lying to yourself”.

I’ve definitely found, time and time again, that bad writing comes from self-deception. Now, sometimes, I’m trying to just throw down some clumsy thoughts, to brainstorm and draft (see below). And this is fine, and I know what’s happening.

But then there are the times that I’m not trying to write clumsily, and I’m getting frustrated, and the words keep mysteriously coming out all vague and dumb: this usually comes from some kind of mental tension, fear, or shame that I’m not admitting to myself. My most common shame when I’m writing is that I should already understand the topic I’m writing about much better than I do. If I don’t understand it, that must mean I’m dumb and bad. And we can’t have that! So to protect me, the inference my brain makes is: I do, in fact, understand. I refuse to look head on at the confusion, I keep on writing as if I understand, and I produce utter pablum as a result.

Ironically, though, one of the best ways of getting your thinking clear is…writing. You sit down to write; it comes out vague and confused; you have to confront the fact that the ideas that are shiny and amazing in your head are, in fact, vague and confused. At that point, you can diagnose where and why they are vague and confused. But you can’t do any of that until you’ve accepted that it’s okay to have vague and confused thoughts.

(Alternatively, you might need to accept that you don’t actually want to think or write about this stuff at all - you just wish you were the sort of person who did. That’s another common problem.)

So - I hope this short post was clear! I truly did want to write it, and it’s also okay if it wasn’t 100% clear. That just means I just need to think about these things more.