Dinty W. Moore’s 10 Rules for Essayists
November 23, 2018 § 11 Comments
The following rules may or may not be based on Jonathan Franzen’s Ten Rules for Novelists, but life is a mystery, and art doubly so.
Dinty W. Moore’s 10 Rules for Essayists
1.
The reader is a friend, literally, because who else is going to read your work?
2.
Essays in which the author does not grapple with the lingering effects of family trauma are probably just about food or possums.
3.
Never use the word fleet as a conjunction—we have flotilla for this purpose. Substituting fleet is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many flotillae on the page.
4.
Writing in third person is just weird.
5.
When information becomes free and universally accessible, we will spend the rest of our lives mindlessly clicking “like” on Twitter.
6.
Purely autobiographical essays require either a moth, a hammer, or a lame horse.
7.
You see more looking out a window than staring down into a caramel macchiato.
8.
It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is not being observed by the NSA.
9.
Interesting verbs seldom intensify, intertwine, shimmer, or transmogrify your writing prowess.
10.
It is easy to forget.
___
Dinty W. Moore was born, did a bunch of things, wrote a few books, and now finds himself pursued by polar bears.
Delightful, Dinty!
Well, there you go. In 10 easy lessons. I’m going to share this with my creative writing students. 🙂
Pitch perfect!
You make writing worth living.
This is welcome guidance, indeed! I have always wanted to be published in Brevity (though I’ve only managed to submit once), and now I have the keys to the kingdom! (I know, a cliché, but it’s just a blog comment.) As it turns out (I know, excess words, but if this were real, I’d edit), I’ve just drafted a personal essay featuring a moth, a hammer, AND a lame horse. I’ll revise it flotilla send it right along.
Okay, but please tell me more about the polar bear.
So glad rules are made to be broken.
Colby agrees with Rule #4. Colby seldom vows to intertwine others’ advice, but henceforth shall avoid writing that way in the future. She shimmers at the idea, although she thinks it will be a difficult transition, she will attempt it, as soon as she looks up transmogrify and learns how to use it in a sentence.
3.5 Fleet is also the enema of the masses.
#10 is all too true for me 😉
[…] W. Moore, who also edits one of my favorite journals, Brevity, countered with a satirical “10 Rules for Essayists.” Franzen makes a lot of predictable moves in his 10 rules. Echoing Stephen King, who railed […]