Strain Versus Effort, or, Contra Jacob Falkovich Contra Sasha Chapin
I'm writing thirty posts in thirty days. This is number twenty-two.
Controversy rages over my Substack!
Recently, I wrote a post about some of my Twitter tactics, which was greeted by acclaim, sweet songs of the pan flute, and gifts of fresh kebab. However, not everyone agreed with my suggestions. Specifically, local luminary Jacob Falkovich took exception to my advice that you shouldn’t think too hard while you’re Tweeting. In an excellent post, he opines, basically, that learning does an odd flip as you get better at something—novices need rules, but masters need to forget them. Thus, when I say “don’t think too hard,” I’m giving bad advice to anyone who hasn’t achieved mastery. (The implication is that I’m a master, which is nice.)
I endorse almost every word of his post. Novices do need explicit rules. “Just be yourself” is insufficient. I, in fact, laid some rules out in the post Jacob is criticizing, a fact which Jacob glosses over quickly, perhaps to optimize for engagement, a tactic I applaud.
But I still don’t think you should think too hard. In fact, a lot of my professional life is staked on this. A big chunk of what I do is get my clients to relax. (It turns out that this is a costly and expensive procedure.) And this always improves their writing. So how does that work?
Try Unclenching
When you’re learning a new skill, often, the impulse is to do something. What you’re doing is difficult, so you want to try hard. But the problem is that you don’t actually know what you should be doing harder. The effort is, at best, counterproductive—it certainly doesn’t help you achieve mastery.
Let’s call this strain. In jiu-jitsu, it looks like spazzing out, which is a good way to hurt yourself while giving your opponent strangulation opportunities. In singing, it looks like tightening up your chest in weird ways. And, in writing, it looks like losing the freshness of vernacular speech.
We’ve all been communicating verbally for our entire lives. My clients come to me as expert verbalists, who speak well when they’re calmly emanating their natural tendencies. The question is how to transfer that expertise onto the page. And, usually, the best place to start, if you’re doing a first draft, is with language approximating what you’d sound like during a good conversation.
This raw material, of course, needs refining. It is usually true that writing is rewriting. But you need a starting point. And that starting point tends to sound like dogshit if you strain—you’re just getting in the way of the verbal abilities you’ve been developing your entire life. (It also requires more effort, so you do more work for inferior results.)
So it is with Twitter. Even as a beginner, you won’t do better by straining. If you try to write glittering little inbent tomes, you’ll just sound pretentious. There’s a balance to be struck: take a few explicit rules into account, but also rely on the fact that you’ve been using language fairly well for a million hours, and that this knowledge is now implicit. Thus, don’t think too hard. Let it flow, then tweak it a little bit, but not so much that you lose all semblance of naturalness.
Or you could also not tweak it. That’s good too. One beautiful thing about Twitter is that it’s a more virtuous learning environment than most social settings. You get feedback fast, and mistakes are ephemeral. Nobody cares about your bad tweets (unless you insist on dealing with the issues of the day, for some reason.) If you’re even a little observant, you can easily tweet a lot, see what works, then let the incentives control you. Twitter rewards play.
Jacob points out that, in the past six months, I seem to have gotten more popular on Twitter. I agree! Where we part ways is his attribution of this change to some linear increase in skill. It’s partly that, but the bigger part is that I became less reserved. Up until six months ago, I was, semi-consciously, attempting to please everyone with tastefully minimal, anodyne nuggets. I was trying too hard. Then I let go.
Since you’ve come this far, I should probably give you an explicit writing rule. Here’s one that was helpful for me: try using the word ‘and’ less often in the middle of your sentences. Somehow if you keep it to a minimum, your prose gains a certain snap. I don’t know why. Try it.