The Two Types of Writing Problems

Issue 246

Milan, 2019

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I’ve come to believe that all writing problems can be divided into two categories. Incidentally: you should be skeptical of anyone who dares to simplify our complex world with such confidence, but I hope that you’ll forget this principle for a moment, because this particular divide happens to be a useful heuristic. After you begin to think about these categories, the path ahead looks a lot more straightforward even when you’re befuddled—if your goal happens to be the crafting of artful sentences.

Unfortunately, I’ve learned that you’ll need to remind yourself of this dichotomy again and again and again—just as the most intuitive and timeworn lessons are often the easiest lessons to forget. Writing is, in some ways, a process of unfurling, it is taking the elusive, inchoate emotions in your mind and tossing them onto a page, in a game that you’ve probably been playing for decades: there’s no secret to make it easy, no methods that always work, because it is, instead, much closer to endlessly shaking yourself to remember something that you already know.

The first category in my divide involves composition. The creation of the words. These are problems of structure. Problems that relate to the arrangement of a sentence. You know exactly what you want to write, but you’re unsure how to fashion the expression: you have a vivid picture in your mind but a tattered delete key on your keyboard. If you’re lucky, your problem is in this category, and you recognize it, because there’s typically a solution to be found. Someone, somewhere, somehow, has already confronted your issue—and there’s a book that reveals how it is done or even a manual that addresses it directly. The trick is to remember that you do, in these moments, know exactly what you want to write, but that you simply can’t manage to articulate what’s in your mind.