March 07th, 2026

           Single Words and Readymade Phrases: Writing as Subtraction and Addition

Forgive the prolixity of this post’s title. Forgive me also if this blog entry ends up going all over the place. It’s fairly late in the evening, several publishers have been running me ragged with various assignments, and to top it all off, I’m on a rough diet. It’s got me a little lightheaded, a little cranky. I think I may be going through carb withdrawal.
Usually it takes me some time to get to the point in these things (sometimes too long) but that shouldn’t be a problem tonight. Mainly because the thing I wanted to talk about—my problem—is staring me in the face in that first paragraph I wrote. Go back there and read it again and see if you can see what the problem is, the weak spot that’s calling out for correction.
Don’t see it? Lucky you. That means you’re not torturing yourself at two a.m. trying to do the impossible, by which I mean perfect your writing.
Here’s the part that’s bothering me: “…to top it all off” is a readymade phrase, and the use of such phrases is many times evidence of lazy writing (or at least a tired mind.) A writer is supposed to consider every word that they write, measure its effect, judge its placement with regards to the other words around it. Only then do larger structures such as sentences and paragraphs begin to factor into the picture.
When you write something like “to top it all off,” or “one fell swoop,” you are not writing. You are basically allowing the stale and tired concepts of other writers to march through your mind, out of your fingers and onto the keyboard.
Kind of scary when you think about it, almost like being possessed by the spirit of some lazy hack.
Maybe, in fact, the writer William Burroughs was correct, and that language itself is a virus, a way for us to contaminate each other with bad ideas. That old “Bull Lee,” developed this insight well before Dawkins talked about memes and “lateral transmission” only underlines the man’s genius. There’s almost a syllogistic logic to it all. Humans are a viruses (in Burroughs’ estimation) and we are inhabited by viruses, and thus everything we do (from sex to speaking) can’t help but be viral.
Maybe we should all just shut the hell up?
There are certain writers who seem to be a little less downbeat than Burroughs, inasmuch as they behave as if they believe the virus is at least treatable. Certain writers have used a reductive, “deceptively simple” style that helped them avoid regurgitating the pat phrases of their lazier forebears. Reading Ernest Hemingway or Cormac McCarthy or Sherwood Anderson—whatever you think of them—is always a clinic in seeing what happens when weighted consideration is given to every word. It’s as if with each keystroke they’re trying to drill through layers of received and accreted wisdom, trying to clear the air and begin anew. It’s learning via unlearning.
Some, like Bukowski, take it a little further. Bukowski, after all, is the one who said he decided to make simplicity his God. Raymond Carver also ideally aimed for sentences of ten words or less, in order to avoid the problem. Keep those sentences short enough and it’s hard to let the pat phrases and preexisting ideas sneak through.
Still, if there is a peril to this style of extreme vigilance, it’s that it seems like…work, both to write and sometimes even to read. Writing, for me, should not be like climbing a mountain, should not be arduous. It should be a way to unwind, find some succor and solace after a long, hard day.
Others obviously don’t feel this way. Someone said that when Normal Mailer wrote, it was common to hear him grumbling, banging things around, making himself miserable.
Hemingway—like a handful of other writers I can think of—wrote while standing up, mostly in the morning.
To me that seems too much like work. Yes, I believe in developing good habits, being disciplined—trying, in a word—but I don’t view writing as a chore, not most times at least.
And Hemingway obviously felt that way. To bring Bukowski back into it again: “Anyone who writes standing up at seven a.m. has no sense of humor. He wants to defeat something.” Hemingway, by the way, began writing early in the morning (also strange and uncomfortable for me) mostly because it left him the afternoons free to fish and drink.
In other words, writing wasn’t a way to have fun; it was something to get out of the way so that he could have fun after that.
And frankly I don’t want to feel this way about writing. I want to have a good time when I write, and if this prevents me from ever creating a stone cold masterpiece, then so be it. I have better things to do than immiserate myself in pursuit of praise and awards. Moreover, I can think of several writers off the top of my head who were feted and showered with accolades who went on to take their lives. Nothing is going to immunize you against the pain of the human condition. You might as well use writing to palliate that pain, rather than exacerbating it in pursuit of some probably phantomic perfection, or praise from other pained beings.
Of course, too, there are times when readymade phrases are entirely appropriate (I almost wrote “just what the doctor ordered” but stopped myself in time.)
Say, for instance, you are writing in close third or first person perspective for someone whose language and culture are well-salted with peculiar idioms. Say this character is especially religious, and very familiar with the Good Book, loquacious and given to homespun wisdom. In such a case, the following would be perfectly acceptable:
“I was plumb tickled when I found out ma wasn’t going to die. Lord willing, she’ll live for many more summers, the crop will come in, and then we’ll be in high clover.”
Those two sentences are filled concepts that did not originate with your character, or with you, the writer. They were inherited, “horizontally transferred” (h/t Dawkins) alongside social mores and taboos as memes, just as eye color or hair color are “vertically transferred” (ibid) via genes.
That’s something else to consider when it comes to starting “fresh” and trying to simplify things in order to avoid using the timeworn and readymade. Language itself is inherited, and while the “language acquisition device” touted by generative grammar proponents has never been literally located in the brain, no words we write (or think, or speak) are probably sui generis, or ever necessarily our own.
Hell, concepts like egology nicely dovetail with Dawkinsonian mimetics to argue there is no “you,” or “me.” And I don’t mean this in the sense a spiritualist guru means it. I simply mean that the concept of personhood is a convenience for our genes to transmit themselves into the next generation. You, in a very fundamental sense, might not even exist, so how can you hope to be an original writer?
It’s something to think about the next time you sit down to write, I suppose. That “you” are not really writing, that it’s all just genes and instinct and mechanisms of the brain developed over eons.
How the hell did I get from talking about aesthetics to this murky outpost of phenomenology?
Hell, don’t ask me. I told you it was late and I was tired and hungry. Even worse, the central heating here has crapped out, so you can add “cold” to that list.
Christ, sometimes I wish I knew how to do something more useful than writing.