I was reading Stephen King’s On Writing and he wrote something that at first enraged me, “Let me repeat my basic premise: if you’re a bad writer, no one can help you become a good one. If you’re good and want to be great… fuhgeddaboudit.” To start with, that’s pandering; everyone reading a book on writing already thinks they are a good writer. I am still offended by that. But at first, I thought he was totally wrong that a bad writer could never become a good writer. I give you as evidence myself.
Now I’m not actually a good writer. I have my moments. But I’m a competent writer, and King states earlier in the book that a competent writer can be made into a good writer. And as our friend Aristotle would tell you, that means that King is saying a bad writer can’t be made into a good writer. Or maybe not. The truth is the book is self-indulgent at times. Those two sentences are good examples. What does “no one can help you” mean? Does he mean you have to do it yourself? I really don’t know. Nor do I really care. My question is whether I might not be a good example of someone who learned how to write.
Becoming a Writer
For the longest time, I just didn’t write. I was in all the idiot English classes in grammar and primary school. In college English, I barely escaped with a C-. If I learned to write, it was quite suddenly. In order to graduate college, I had to take an upper-division writing class. I took the same instructor who had given me the C-. I liked the guy, even if, as a teacher, he was kind of a jerk. Anyway, the first assignment was to write a five page analysis of a single comic strip.
I picked a Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin was complaining to Hobbes about how disappointing the future was. “Where are the jet-packs?!” And that’s when I got it. Writing was just thinking on the page. You were just telling a story. I got an A- on it, because my teacher was incapable of giving anyone an A on their first paper. But more important, I loved the process. Of course, I had always loved telling stories.
I remember when I was in the fifth grade, we did a unit on tall tales. And everyone had to stand up in class and tell everyone a tall tale of their liking. Everyone picked one of the stories we had studied. I, as usual, was not prepared. As I got up, I didn’t really know which of the many stories I was going to tell. But in the time it took me to walk to the front of the class, it occurred to me that James and the Giant Peach was, in fact, a tall tale. And I wasted ten minutes of the class’ time recounting the entire novel.
Becoming a Good Writer
So maybe I am hardwired to tell stories. And maybe other people aren’t. But that Calvin and Hobbes essay wasn’t that different from my fifth grade triumph — except that in my last year of college I had something original to say.
Just the same, maybe there is something that changed. In the couple of years before, I started reading — a lot. It was mostly 19th century British literature — especially the women: Austen, Eliot, the Brontës. Reading is critical to learning to write. So I guess ultimately, I both agree and disagree with King. If you don’t love communicating — telling stories made-up or true — you will never learn to write. But if you care, can become quite a good writer — if you work on it. You much care to be able to do the work.
Alito attempts to get around Smith through a kind of bait and switch. “A law that discriminates against religiously motivated conduct is not ‘neutral,'” Alito writes, and he tries to paint this law as one that singles out religious conduct — and religious conduct alone — for inferior treatment. “The [Washington State Board of Pharmacy] has specifically targeted religious objections,” Alito claims. “Upon issuing the regulations, the Board sent a guidance document to pharmacies warning that ‘[t]he rule does not allow a pharmacy to refer a patient to another pharmacy to avoid filling the prescription due to moral or ethical objections.'”
The racists have successfully articulated a broad anti-establishment sentiment — originating in class injuries, regional decline, postindustrial devastation, generational anxieties, etc — along bigoted, national chauvinist lines. The vote cannot be reduced to racism and nationalism — but that is the primary way in which it has been organised and recruited and directed, and that is the primary way in which the outcome will be experienced. That this was achieved so soon after the fascist murder of a center-left, pro-immigrant MP, is stunning in a way. It says something about the truculence of some of the chauvinism on display. It says something about the profound sense of loss which a reasserted “Britishness” is supposed to compensate for.
I have been vaguely aware that Scott Adams was a Men’s Rights Advocate (MRA). It doesn’t come as a complete surprise. The female characters in Dilbert are typical of the thinking of teenage boys, which is pretty typical of MRAs. But I did find his recent article amusing, 
If Clinton does select Warren, or another progressive, like Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, political junkies will undoubtedly interpret it as a strategic decision to keep movement progressives in the Democratic fold — or, in Brown’s case, to tighten the Democratic Party’s hold on a crucial swing state. But it would actually be an indication that Clinton approves of the party’s ideological drift since the end of her husband’s presidency, and wants her presidency to boost its momentum in that direction.
I’m very pleased that the 
I’m a bit of a fan of Aziz Ansari. He plays Darryl, the young nerd on Bob’s Burgers. (Yes, Bob’s Burgers is such a great show that it features two nerds without it being a “thing.”) And this weekend in The New York Times, Ansari wrote a thoughtful and touching opinion piece, 
Today, we are going to consider a very bad sentence. And it was written by a really smart guy.
For the first time in what I think is years, Frankly Curious went a whole day without anything being posted. There was no big reason for this. I didn’t go to the hospital. I didn’t get fired. But I’ll explain how it happened.
As you all know, I work with writers all over the world. This creates a special problem. It’s difficult to work with freelancers regardless. When you work with employees, everyone can be depended upon to know the company style. But that’s asking a bit much for a writer who might have a dozen clients. But I find dealing with the British variants of English to be more annoying. This is mostly because I think the British are just being difficult by insisted upon things like adding unnecessary “u” characters into words that clearly don’t need them. I’m also not keen on the use of “s” when “z” is obviously called for. The quotation marks are different.
There was one argument against Bernie Sanders being the Democratic nominee that I most hated: he isn’t even a Democrat. There are many reasons why I hated it. For one, it’s tribal. For another, it has nothing to do with policy — or even electability. But most of all, I just didn’t see that it mattered to the Democratic voter given Sanders has always caucused with the Democrats. Just the same, it is for this reason that I had hoped he would endorse Hillary Clinton once the primary was over.