Hello Writers!

I am writing to you from the snowy, icy tundra that was once the city of Philadelphia. Today, we are expected to hit 30 degrees, so maybe the remnants of last week’s awful weather will be moving along soon because I’m tired of walking past urine and vomit speckled snow and trudging over dank, gray ridges piled high at the curb to get on and off the bus.

We’ve officially moved into the month of amor and this year we’re celebrating 100 years of Black History Month. When I was the editor of the Black Joy newsletter, Black History Month was always a major time of year for us. One year, we focused on loving Black teachers. Jarvis R. Givens is a beautiful, brilliant genius who wrote the book, “Fugitive Pedagogy,” about Carter G. Woodson and the radical role of Black educators. Woodson, the founder of Black History Month, is on my “One Day I’ll Write An Essay About This” list. Woodson intrigues me because he spent a stint of time in the Philippines, after it was commandeered by the Americans, to establish their education system and I’m always fascinated by the intersections of Black and Filipino history because that’s where my identity lies.

In this week’s newsletter, I’m letting you in on the one writing tip you can follow to get away with breaking every writing rule. Can you guess what it is? 👀

— Minda

In the first essay in The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes,

Growing up, my dad reminded me all the time that it doesn’t matter how smart you are, if no one can understand you. As writers, we all have our magic. There’s no better feeling than when you’ve written something that’s steeped in what makes your writing special. People are often equal parts surprised and impressed, that my writing can feel so casual while being so intellectual. And I think that’s because my writing breaks a lot of the rules of what we’re told is “good” writing, is “smart” writing, that parred back minimalism on the page. The lofty language. The disregard for whether or not reading your writing is enjoyable for the reader.

But when I was being taught these things about writing, I couldn’t help but notice that the writers I enjoyed the most didn’t abide by most of these metrics. I wanted to be writer whose work was beautiful and dense and lush and a lil’ bit transgressive. As I grew as a writer, I learned that you can basically do whatever you want with your writing as long as you execute it effectively. And what does effective execution boil down to?

Clarity.

Coates is writing about clarity as a moral imperative in our writing, but clarity is essential to our writing in many other ways. Most writing rules are really just shorthand for achieving clarity. Let’s return to our example of Ross Gay and the run-on sentences in “Tomato on Board.”

Typically, we’re cautioned away from run-ons because the longer a sentence goes on, the easier it becomes to get lost in it. That’s because it loses clarity. However, Gay structures his run-on sentences in a way that gives the work a thrilling air without losing any of its clarity.

Verlyn Klinkenborg has written a (very good) craft book dedicated to keeping your sentences brief (at first) with the intent of figuring out if your sentences are saying what you think they’re saying. Writing a short, concise sentence is just as challenging as writing a long sentence that doesn’t feel bloated and sloppy.

There’s a difference between a sentence you’ve intentionally gone long on and one you’ve inadvertently written as a lengthy fella. In my early drafts, I notice I write these runaway train sentences that go on and on that mirror the grasping I’m doing mentally at an idea that’s just out of reach. Once I’m clear on what I think or feel and how to say it, the sentence tends to naturally tighten up.

As a writing exercise, you can go into a draft and choose a long sentence to rewrite short and short sentence to rewrite long. Play around this way with a few different sentences in your draft. See how the ideas behind the sentence become less or more clear.

Now, I know I told you if you follow the rule of Clarity Above All Else, you can break all the other rules, but sometimes, you have to break the clarity rule itself. There are times in your writing that you will need to choose between making a choice that serves the writing or making a choice that serves a different priority.

For example, I wrote a piece for Harper’s Bazaar about becoming friends with my sisters as adults after returning home in my 30s. The editor made a note wanting me to be more specific about past conflicts me and my sisters had faced. I pushed back. I chose to prioritize my relationship with my sisters over the writing. I didn’t feel like the slight increase in clarity was worth the possible drama that might arise by bringing old conflict back up, especially publicly.

I think ultimately the piece still worked, but there are times where I’ve realized I couldn’t be as clear as I wanted to be and that that meant the essay no longer worked or that it just wasn’t the right time for that essay to go out into the world.

I recently finished reading Lidia Yuknavitch’s latest book, Reading the Waves, toward the end in an essay about missing her son who is leaving/has left for college, there’s a passage where she chooses not to dive too deep into her son’s story, saying that’s for him to tell. When we write our own stories, it’s impossible to do so without some overlap with other people, and we have to decide which lines we’re comfortable crossing and which we aren’t. And it’s okay to be direct with the reader when we’re making a choice to prioritize someone else’s privacy over our own transparency.

Let me know in the comments how you invite clarity in your writing.