One thing I can say for certain. This won't be a column about cats. No cats will appear here. Or if there are a few, they won't be inexperienced, amateurish cats.
People who want to write columns about cats should get some cats who know what they're doing. Cats reveal themselves to be professionals by virtue of the fact that they will refuse to appear in your column.
Never, ever, ever, ever, ever write a column about cats. It seems that no one in this whole damn country can write about any personal experience using more than 20 words without throwing in a reference to sweet-little-whoogums. I personally wonder why the cats everyone talks about so much don't start up their own publishing house. And it's always some bizarre story about how the gruesome death of Mr. Nibbles inside a truck radiator taught somebody the value of life. I calculated once that if all the college application essays that high school students wrote about dead family cats were true, then the entire world cat population should have disappeared during the Ford administration.
We do incredible violence to these hypothetical cats. If these cats knew the things people were writing about them, they'd be offended. One measure of the good taste of cats is that they never write columns about people.
So the question becomes, if we can't write about cats, what can we write about? An excellent question. But before we choose what to write about, we should mention a couple of guidelines regarding the process of writing itself.
There is one law that rules over all prose without exception. All good writers unquestioningly accept its authority. It is the Golden Rule of Composition: Ninety percent of all written prose deserves a merciful death. The remaining 10 percent deserves a cruel death. Remember this simple rule and your writing career will be easy and rewarding, by virtue of the fact that you won't have one. Just writing and then sadistically shredding your pages of prose will provide hours of enjoyment. And remember, a writing career spent destroying your own work will benefit the lives of others immensely, because they won't feel obliged to destroy your work themselves.
If you decide that you really must write something for someone besides yourself, please check your own specifications beforehand to make sure that you are not a dolt.
For some inexplicable reason the only people who write stuff just to write stuff are dolts, and the stuff they write goes on the opinion pages of campus publications. No one ever writes anything interesting there, period. Contributors to opinion pages come in two groups: 1) freshmen who, having come to a truly unique and intelligent insight on the state of culture and politics, feel obliged to share their invaluable wisdom concerning current events with the rest of us and 2) dolts. Sometimes the groups overlap. Contributors to the editorials pages should be thanked for their time and effort. Then they should be given one hard smack and viciously mocked.
There are lots of other rules, most of which I won't tell you and all of which are subject to immediate and entirely capricious change. The dashes that writers oftentimes use-such as these-most of the time-aren't used correctly. A great many people I know use semicolons; and it always annoys me; because semicolons aren't supposed to be given away-like Monopoly money.
3) A column isn't a shopping list. Don't number your items. Finally, try to avoid writing in strange languages that es possible que sus leerers no entienden. Nada es más arogante que escribiendo en lenguage que su audencia no escriben si mismos. Recuerda Ud., que los concernos de su audencia son su más importante consideración, y sólo un pedante insuportable los ignoraria, aún si escribiendo en espanol sea vitally important for the immediate physical safety of the persons reading this column.
There is one final, important rule. Never, ever, ever, ever assume that the reader is at all initially interested in the Homeric epic that is your life. Don't make your topic too profound, in case you write for a philosophy periodical, in which case there are only five people reading what you write anyway, one of whom is your mother and another the Unabomber.
Never exercise your own personal frustrations in print. Those frustrations are probably ugly enough as they are. If you suppose that the only worthwhile purpose for your prose is to shake your fist at the universe, think again. Wrestling with God presumes He recognizes you to be a worthy opponent.
All of which is to say, don't suppose you know anything at all because you probably know a little less. And the easiest and most irritating thing a writer can do is make it seem like he knows more than he actually does.
For more information, see Appendix.
Copyright 1996, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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