Hal - Deliberately Basic

The Power of the Platitude

If you can find a single sentence without a Cliché in this piece, I’ll eat my hat.

Whether talking or writing, but with an emphasis on writing, most people are so trite, they prattle on and on with unrelenting verbal sleeping pills, and after a while they begin to sound like a babbling brook, or worse turn into a persona non grata. It’s a crying shame that most communication is in the form of time worn platitudes and clichés as old as the hills. Writers need to take the bull by the horns, stand back, and look before they leap when releasing their work for public scrutiny. After all, as my grandfather used to say, if you want to make an omelette you have to break some eggs.

The average John Q. Public may not understand the difference between a well-written piece and the shameful slop that passes for good writing, or even if he does know, may be apathetic and not care. We live in a time when a well-rounded education is as rare as hen’s teeth, where most people specialize in a particular discipline, and the so-called Renaissance man has fallen by the wayside. Of course this raises several questions, such as, how did this sad state of affairs come about? How do we find a solution for this, or even a band-aid fix? And most importantly, is the situation going to decline even further and snowball into a state of chaotic non-communication?

The ocean of knowledge that exists now is so huge that mastering even a single subject has stretched beyond the bounds of possibility, especially now that the focus, like stink on a June bug, is so much on technology. As we know, what goes round comes round, and shit happens, but this situation is entirely out of hand. A whiz-kid who can write thousands of lines of computer code often cannot fire off a simple English sentence that would make sense to a goose, let alone the world at large. And some of these kids, like a cat covering up crap on the freeway, are faster than a one-armed paper hanger. But technology is not the only fly in the ointment. Getting a liberal education is like looking for a needle in a haystack. You could swear on a stack of bibles that it just doesn’t exist anymore.

Besides a need to be well rounded, a writer needs the nurturing of other writers, that is, he needs to be familiar with what good writing is, just as hogs need slop. Editors can be as cold as a witch’s tit when it comes to picking and choosing what to publish. You have to be a glutton for punishment to want to be a writer these days, especially fiction or poetry writing. But, if that’s what blows your skirt up, then you have to follow that dream. On the other hand, you have fingers, or at least a writer should.

Non-fiction writing is much easier to get a handle on, as far as getting published, than fiction writing. If you can whack off a book about anything to do with computers, for instance, you are much more likely to be successful marketing it than say, a sappy, run of the mill romance novel. This does not mean that bad writing will suffice in non-fiction, and if you think that is the case, you are barking up the wrong tree trying to get published. Even non-fiction needs to pack a punch, and make learning fun for the reader.

Good speech habits, correct diction, and a good vocabulary, are as necessary as air if you want to write well. Just remember, zero is sometimes better than nothing. You don’t want to rock the boat, but you do want people to pay attention, so half a loaf is better than none. This is called precision, and better to be safe than sorry. If you fail to cultivate these virtues in yourself, then you won’t have a Chinaman’s chance in hell of achieving success as a writer, and remember, if you’re not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. Let this be your paradigm for self-improvement, and by all means, don’t sweat the small stuff, but don’t quote me on that.

Hal Brown

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