My Own Damn Constitution

One hears a lot of talk these days about constitutions, primarily the good old U.S. one, and specifically what’s left of it after each news cycle. But my son recently attended the constitutional convention of a national tenants federation, and 91% of voters in Gabon approved a constitution in 2024, according to my research the world’s newest. Never one to miss out on a trend no matter how many logical knots I must twist to justify my entry, I decided to write a constitution for the written word(s), and I further decided that instead of detailing my qualifications I should just assume James Madison status and jump right in with the

Preamble

Here it is: Preambles are bullshit, unless you like them and if so by all means, have at it. Sometimes I take forever to get to my point, in cases where I have a point, and anyone who tries to tell you that having a point is necessary is also full of it. Sometimes I make my point before either the reader or I am ready. My point here, and this time I do have one, is that the only rules that exist about writing are those you decide upon for at least the next but not necessarily more than the next word, as for the word after that you may decide on a tiny change or a whole new set of rules. You get to decide, because you’re the one who has exhibited the stones to sit down and accept the challenge put forth by journalist and Hollywood scribe John Fowler—whose kids were reportedly the only ones W.C. Fields ever liked—who said: “Writing is easy. You just stare at a blank page until drops of blood form on your forehead.” If the reader has a problem with any of your rules or their ever-changing nature, maybe they shouldn’t be part of your audience. You’re not for everyone; god, the ego on you.

Article 1: This and everything that follows is really in service of the rule above about there not being any rules, but to complicate matters a bit—hey, freedom isn’t free, buddy—there is an overall godhead that supersedes even the no-rules rule, and that is that all efforts must be in service to your message. That’s the only rule I never break. And I suppose it is possible to not have a message at all, but 1) if we can agree that nihilism is a belief system, even if that belief is in nothingness, then I think it follows that 2) even in professing to write message-free one is in fact messaging, but either way it’s a boring argument and so hard pass.

I take message to be a wildly elastic term, and I encourage you to as well. I once wrote an entire essay composed almost entirely of digressions just to see if I could. Sometimes I use language that echoes the overall message as a way of reinforcing it, sometimes I’ll use language that clashes in order to get the reader’s attention and make a point. Sometimes I’ll mix it up. It’s like I imagine basketball would be if I were way better than I ever was and understood it’s about the ability to remain in control and achieve your objective from different angles and with varying rhythms. And then there’s…

Article 2: Caring what other people think, but only certain people and even them not too much. My best writing is informed but rarely influenced by others, and maybe your instincts about such things are better than mine, but I’m often wrong about whether or not people will like a particular piece, and even that analysis is gleaned from such a small sample of humans it’s not really of any value, yet another reason to write to please yourself, except that…

Article 3: If you’re not writing exclusively for your own entertainment, aggrandizement, and/or edification, and you want to have any chance of success, you must ask and receive answers to the following two questions: 1) Who will read the finished product, assuming you ever produce one and 2) what do you want them to think/feel/do when they’re done reading it? I have worked on museum projects that had budgets with many many zeroes but no dollars devoted to figuring out who might be coming and what they might want and/or expect in the experience. Don’t be like them. Your readers are taking time they could be spending with Ann Patchett or Michael Chabon or James Baldwin, for crissakes, so at least make their interests a noteworthy stop on your creative path.

Article 4: If you want, use the whole language. Like the whole fucking language. Annoy your readers if that’s how you’re feeling that day, as long as that’s not the only reader reaction you produce. I suppose there are writers talented enough to make being constantly annoying somehow compelling, but I know my limitations. I was taught and still believe in the open marketplace of ideas, and while I had to learn to love the entire language on whatever passes for mean streets in this idiom, I don’t really get any other approach. Why would it be a word if I wasn’t supposed to use it? Are their types of apples I’m not supposed to eat?

Article 5: The longer the metaphor the better. This is an absolute mathematical rule that is always consistent. Here, I’ll show you.

Ruprecht’s sarcasm sliced through decorum like a chain saw through tofu.

OR

Ruprecht’s sarcasm sliced through decorum like the 13th-century Honjo crafted by famed swordsmith Goro Masamune and considered the greatest sword in Japanese history that was turned over to US forces in 1945 and hasn’t been seen since because we ruin everything through the famed Salt Air Margarita Foam conceived by World Central Kitchen founder Jose Andres during a mystical moment watching sea foam spray blast up from rocks on the Andalucian coast. Okay, so not always consistent, but still, more metaphor = better metaphor. Or is that a simile?

Article 6: Don’t be afraid to use words incorrectly. Sure, there’s a dictionary at your fingertips, but why disrupt your rhythm, confidence and momentum by making sure you’re using this or that word correctly. Most people will either get it from context or feel momentarily superior because they know a word you apparently don’t, so win-win.

Article 7: If you get stuck, don’t panic. Writing is hard, which is the only reason anyone ever paid anyone else to do it for them. No one would ever hire a writer if we didn’t care what kind of screeching monster we sounded like when we wrote something ourselves, but thankfully we do or I’d have had to work much harder than I did for several decades. The term deadline is intentionally hyperbolic; very few people have actually died from missing one. The closest I ever came was making mad the XXXXL-sized press crew chief at the Owatonna People’s Press, who couldn’t start his work until I finished mine, and would quicken my pulse and pace of work when he brought his massive shadow to the composing room. But he was a big softie anyway, all of which is to say it’s not the end of the world if it isn’t perfect, which is good because it will never be thus.

If you get really stuck, get up and start pacing and talking—with your Notes app on record. Just say what you’re trying to write out loud and without concern for punctuation or narrative flow or even cogency, then take a break, go back to it in 10 minutes and see if you don’t have something in there you can use. If not, like the bottle says, lather, rinse, repeat.

I probably should have mentioned up front that I am in no way qualified to teach anyone anything about writing other than what I’ve learned on my own and largely accidentally over a very long period of time, to borrow a phrase from the most remarkable mangler of language ever to stain a White House pillow. If there were writing classes at either Woodrow Wilson High School or Kenyon College I certainly never enrolled in any, and the two journalism courses I took in the late 1970s at the University of Minnesota were way less concerned with writing than they were with producing the next Woodward or Bernstein, neither of whom I had any interest in becoming.

I first started expressing myself in writing in college letters to my high school friends, then after college to my college friends. All I learned in my newspaper years was I didn’t like asking strangers personal questions—I’ve done a 180 on that—or having to produce under pressure. Three years of writing game stories and producing three sports pages six nights a week aged me invisibly but indelibly. Thirty years of writing tiny little stories to go on museum walls most people don’t read taught me the importance of rhythm and economy in language and storytelling, and above even those the importance of being entertaining, as if there isn’t something noticeably interesting or fun in the first block of text most visitors won’t read a second.

I’ve brought that approach to this vehicle, as in I’d better be entertaining because often those are the only clothes this emperor has. But I still believe what I was told 40 years ago at of all things a sportswriting seminar by of all people an editor at the Birmingham Post-Herald: “If you make a reader smile or laugh in the beginning of an article, they will read every word hoping you’ll do it again.”

For your own writing, all I’d say is the more you relax and quit worrying about making it better than it can or needs to be and instead try to enjoy the process as much as possible because I do believe how you feel comes through in your writing and helps you avoid run-on sentences like this one. And like anything else in life, just because you aren’t great at it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. My mother was the only member of our six-person nuclear family who couldn’t carry a tune, and I still feel badly that we’d often stop singing when she chimed in.

Last but not least, make sure to have an appropriate reward ready for when you have reached that nirvana-like state of “having written.” After all, whatever you wrote—unless you used AI, which is fine too as I don’t know enough about it to offer an informed opinion except to say that it’s quite obviously incredibly sophisticated plagiarism—is utterly unique. Never before in human history has someone put down those words in exactly that order, so whatever you get/do for yourself, make it good.