How to write like a dingleberry
Everyone wants to be the next great writer.
We beg the best writers for tips and tricks on how to be successful. They oblige and appear on podcasts where they bombard the listener with esoteric writing practices such as morning pages, deep work, transcendental meditation, morning rituals, bedtime rituals, journaling, and, of course, psychedelics.
Apparently controversial statement: For 99.99% of people, adding yak butter and ayahuasca into your routine isn’t the logical next step in your writing career.
Instead, we should avoid being the worst writer.
Trying to be the best vs. not being the worst
Reframing the question this way is known as inversion.
The algorithm looks like:
- Write down how to do the opposite of the task you want to accomplish.
- Don’t do what you wrote down.
This exercise helps you avoid stupidity which is a prerequisite for brilliance.
Inversion in action: How to be unhappy
Three years ago, I finished up a rolling quarter-life crisis.
This crisis sent me down countless Google tailspins searching for answers to the nebulous question: “how to be happy”.
My name is on the email list of every Internet guru who claimed he/she could answer that question. I remember signing up and thinking:
- “Bet this online class about happiness will solve it!”
- “Oh of course it was the breathing exercises that I wasn’t doing.”
- “I am an idiot. How did I not realize that it was my mental model around happiness that needed to be updated the whole time…”
This was all counterproductive. I attempted to solve the wrong problem.
Instead of asking “how to be happy?” I should have asked, “how to be unhappy?”
The answer is obvious.
Unhappy people:
- Spend all day asking a computer why they aren’t happy.
- Surround themselves with miserable, uninspiring people.
Instead of focusing on how to be happy, I should have avoided those two conditions of unhappiness.
I would have been 90% of the way towards solving my happiness problem.
Inverting writing: Avoid being a dingleberry by avoiding dingleberries
Dingleberry – noun – (1) a foolish or inept person. (2) dung that clings to the hindquarters of an animal.
Terrible writers sound like idiots (dingleberries) because of all the shit (dingleberries) that clings to their writing.
Consider the following terrible paragraph:
DINGLEBERRY: Fundamentally, word counts lead to people stuffing their essays with very long-winded ways of saying what they were trying to say. They became masters of adding too many words to say a simple point. They are in for a rude awakening when they hit the real world. Basically we begin to realize that word count doesn’t really matter.
The solution: Powerwash that shit off.
NON-DINGLEBERRY: Word counts caused students to optimize for quantity of words over substance. All readers care about is getting to the point.
The rest of this post is a list of words/phrases you should remove from your writing. Do this and you will be well on your way to not being the worst writer.
HOW TO USE THIS POST
Step 1: Revisit this post when you are editing your writing.
Step 2: Search for the word or phrase.
Step 3: Delete, replace, or decide it needs to stay.
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FIND AND DELETE
If the sentence still makes sense, remove it.
Unnecessary
- Your personal quirky filler words (ask for feedback or reread your old pieces)
- That
- Just
- Totally
- Completely
- Absolutely
- Literally
- Definitely
- Certainly
- Probably
- Actually
- Basically
- Virtually
- Currently
- Start
- Begin
- Began
- Begun
- Rather
- Quite
- Dialogue tags (ie: said, replied, asked, etc.) after first couple sentences
- Down (if following sat)
- Up (if following stood)
- Wonder
- Ponder
- Think
- Thought
- Feel
- Felt
- Understand
- Realize
- Leading words: so, mostly, most times, in order to, often, oftentimes.
- “To Be” verbs: am, are, is, was, were, being, been
- As a matter of fact
- While
- Irregardless (this is not a word)
- I think
- Truth be told (don’t you always tell the truth?)
- The month of { } (we get how months work…)
- In the end
- When all’s said and done
- Starting to
- Begin to
- Honestly (aren’t you always honest?)
- In terms of
- For all intents and purposes
- Personal opinion
- Any infinitive/basic form of a verb (to walk)
- Had/Has
Overused
- Empower
- Synergy
- Disruptive
- Collaboration
- Innovative
- At the end of the day
- Broader challenge
- Above and beyond
- Incredible experience
- No matter what
- Most importantly
- All around the world
- Across the board
- The bottom line
- In the past few years
- Last a lifetime
- As a result
- A few years ago
- Increases the likelihood
- Handful
- Amazing
- Wonderful
- the public
Be sure of yourself
- Perhaps
- Maybe
- One of
- Believe
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FIND AND REPLACE
Reword it.
Use better word or phrase
- There are
- Breath/breathe
- Inhale/exhale
- Really
- Very
- Rather
- Quite
- Basically
- Totally
- Essentially
- So
- Next
- Then
- Went
- Adverbs (words that end with “-ly”)
- In the process of
- All of
- About
- Additionally
- All
- Every
- Always
- Never
- Almost
- Nearly
- Finally
- In order to
- Need
- Not
- Only
- Merely
- Perfect
Be more specific
- Some
- Sometimes
- Something
- Somehow
- Someone
- Someway
- Somewhere
- Somewhat
- Somebody
- Thing
- Always
- Never
- Stuff
- Frequently
- Many
- Few
- During the course of
- Big
- Small
- Short
- Tall
- Often
- Frequently
Choose one
- Each and every
- Past history
- Past experience
- As to whether → choose whether or if
- As to whether or not → choose whether or if
- With the possible exception of → choose except or except for
- Due to the fact → replace with because
- have got → you have something, without the got
- first created
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CAVEATS:
- This list will expand. Overused words change with time. For example, I received feedback that I should replace “the weird part of the internet” because it is borderline cliche. Four years ago, that was a novel phrase. Now we oversaturated the market.
- These are suggestions. If you want to leave the word, leave it! Look at your use and decide if it makes sense.
- Listening to all of these is not possible. If Shakespeare followed these rules, he would have never written: “To be or not to be?” The rules are there to help you think, not to make the decision for you.
Remember: Your journey to be the next bestseller begins with not sounding like the worst seller.
Resources that helped me create this list:
