Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content, Second Edition
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Chapter 4: Secret #4—Write the Way You Think

If you’ve ever been given advice on how to prepare a document for the business community, you’ve probably been admonished to “write the way you speak.” That is, you’ve been asked to make your document sound conversational—and, therefore, easier to understand—by using contractions, plain words, personal pronouns, and a dozen minirules to give the impression that you’re hovering behind your readers, whispering directly into their ears (although if they tried to shoo you away, there’d be nothing there to swat).

This plain English style of writing is invaluable when you’re trying to communicate with others but less valuable for the freewriting page. It’s not that the “write the way you speak” tenets are wrong during freewriting, it’s that they don’t go far enough.

During a bout of freewriting, it’s imperative that you get at your raw thoughts before the prissy side of your mind cleans them up for public viewing and, in the process, squelches their effectiveness. So don’t “write the way you speak,” but “write the way you think.” Here’s what I mean.

So far, this chapter is written in the kind of language I use when I speak. True, I’ve edited out lots of “Umms,” “You knows?” and other fillers that punctuate my spoken messages. But if you and I had an in-person conversation, you’d certainly recognize me as the same guy who wrote this text, given my vocal cadence, word choices, and expressed thoughts. To you, this Mark-as-writer and Mark-as-speaker would be congruent because in both instances I’m using the same part of my brain that dresses up thoughts for public consumption.

When I write for myself, however, I don’t necessarily access this publicly oriented part of my brain. I use the writing solely as a way of watching myself think. Here’s an unedited, honest-to-goodness example of a writing session during which my recording hand merely followed the path laid down by my coffee-soaked brain:

Let’s try one with muscle. Lots of useless writing. Abandon the logical edge. This paper will come up from my gurgling stomach, and I’ll burp it across the page. Of course, from bleech to finished product often comes out compromised, a provisional bleech. But this is an experiment.

As Glenn says, the review is short enough to do two, three, four reviews, an entire book of reviews, written by me on the same Ripken book, each expressing a different point, or the same point in different language; here wharf foreman, there dancemaster. So where’s the beef, huh? What should I look at?

I tried initially to cull the crunchy details from Iron Man and paste them into some A to B form. To Stella and Susan, that worked. But to Michael and Floyd, it didn’t. How can I use good details (there are few to spare), and paste it down to a vivid review, giving Michael “something I can’t forget”?

To you, this passage probably reads like gibberish, despite the fact that the words I used are, for the most part, conventional, and the sentence structures that house those words, ordinary. From your perspective, this passage might look like a failure of communication. To me, it’s just the opposite.

This passage so clearly mirrors the way thoughts bound around my head that even today, fifteen years after I wrote it, I can clearly see all the points I was driving at.

I achieved this miraculous clarity through these three techniques:

1. I used kitchen language.

What’s kitchen language? Coined by Ken Macrorie, it’s a phrase that describes the language you use around the house when you’re lounging in knock-around clothes, as the television hums in the background, and you yap with your best friend on the phone. It’s good, strong language, but not the kind you’d normally use to get your point across in most settings. Kitchen language is your own slang, the words you use that best capture the idea of a thought or an object, even if you’re the only one who gets what you mean.

In my freewriting excerpt, I used the kitcheny “bleech.” What does “bleech” mean?

Judging from the language preceding it—words like “gurgling” and “burp”—I assume that it’s a hybrid of “belch” and “retch,” and I used it metaphorically, to express the feeling I get when I try to expel ideas during a writing session. “Burp” would have been too weak; “retch” would have been too violent. Therefore, “bleech.”

Could I have used more conventional language to make that point to myself? Of course. But during that particular writing session, my racing mind decided “provisional bleech” was what I needed to say. I didn’t sit at my desk and deliberate about it. I merely followed what my mind asked me to write. That’s what you should do, too.

Just concentrate on writing loosely and honestly about the subject at hand. Strong kitchen language will come instinctively.

Chapter 4 Contents

1. I used kitchen language.
2. I kept quiet about those things that needed no explanation.
3. I jumped around.
Points to Remember
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