"I just woke up and wrote this..."

The Myth of Effortless Writing and Why Rhetoric Matters

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Writing is a tricky craft because though everyone wants to practice it, the practice seems to be lost on everyone.

Unlike messing around with the guitar or learning how to paint, we don’t like to think of writing as something that needs to be practiced. We want writing to be natural, innate and an ever-flowing spring of magic. And if anyone dares to bring up the word “rhetoric”, we’d jump on a chair and accuse them of being a snob.

I recently read a post by

Henry Oliver

with quite a divisive title: Writing Advice is A Lie. His argument is quite simple: don’t learn from writing advice, learn rhetoric and grammar instead.

At first, this idea sounds overly academic, antiquarian and agonisingly English, but a quick window-shopping session on the internet for writing advice paints a more complete picture.

Insofar as the internet calls such listicles writing advice, these advice articles have one thing in common: they’re all second-order practices that have nothing to do with writing itself.

I fell headfirst into the cult of writing advice. “Write every morning!” One article instructs. “It’s supposed to be difficult!” another one screams. “Make sure your environment is set up right!” I nodded. But then, after setting up the whole shebang: a cup of coffee and a clean workspace at the break of dawn, I was still stuck with an empty page, wondering: how the hell do I do this?

I Just Woke Up and Wrote This Sentence.

If we just probe a little deeper and ask things like: how do we know if an idea is worth writing about, or how do I structure a paragraph, these advice people either resort to jumping out of the fire escape or wave us away with something like: just follow your instincts, man! Don’t overthink it.

This is what I’d like to call the woke-up-like-this effect in writing. Writers usually tell us that the paragraphs simply flowed out of them because it sounds Romantic, mystical and paints them as some larger-than-life genius. All you need is a great idea, man! In reality, however, agonising over a single sentence and obsessing over how to end a paragraph is Latin for finally getting down to write. It just sounds less cool.

For example, I spent a whole morning on the opening line of this letter: “everyone wants to practice it, [but] the practice seems to be lost on everyone” because it contains two rhetorical devices: Chiasmus + Polyptoton and one argumentative form: The Uneven-U.

Chiasmus is basically a sentence repeated backwards to create a certain symmetry to the clause. E.g.: JFK’s famous line: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” This device usually gives the reader that “ahhhh, that’s so true!” feeling.

Polyptoton is Greek for “many cases”, and it stands for using the same word in different cases/tenses. In my case, the word “practice” was first used as a verb (everyone wants to practice it), then a noun (but the practice seems to be…). Shakespeare was known for this in Richard II: “Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle:”

And The Uneven-U is a general rule of thumb for crafting paragraphs (read this article to get a good sense of it). In simple terms, each paragraph should contain one unit of idea, and the ending of one paragraph should lead into the first sentence of the subsequent one.

I certainly didn’t just wake up and write this article. And whenever I am delusional enough to trust my inner genius, I typically end up with some of the worst writing that makes no sense. So, next time when you’re stuck, remember that no good writing is a pure accident, because as Mark Forsyth puts it in the opening of The Elements of Eloquence:

“[Even] Shakespeare was not a genius.”

Capturing The Lightning In The Bottle

So, Robin. Is inspiration and passion completely useless then? Not quite.

Though competent writing can be shaped by rhetoric, rhetoric alone does not produce competent writing (see what I did there?). The trick here is to rob rhetoric of its tools and mix in a bit of passion and inspiration.

Think of it this way: ideas are like lightning strikes. Sometimes a good one will land in your lap, but it’s completely useless if we don’t have the bottle to materialise them into writing. And rhetoric, in this case, is the bottle to capture lightning. It’s the boring E Major scale that we have to practice before we can improvise on stage.

So, don’t view practising writing as something boring or to shy away from because the magic happens when a brilliant idea makes contact with eloquent rhetoric. It is the lightning in the bottle and the joy of shaking the world with your words.

If this idea intrigues you, stick around for next Monday’s post on our 1-2-Read newsletter. There is so much more to rhetoric, and I’d love to tell you all about it. In this upcoming post, I’ll break down a list of my favourite writing devices and show you how you can use them too. But for now, that’s all I have for this post.

Until next week

Robin