Good Writing – Neal Allen Anne Lamott (1)

I mean—whoa, dude! (By the way, while we’re on the subject of metaphors, my father described Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as metaphor upon metaphor. Duh duh duh duh. Duh duh duh duh: Life is pounding on the door and then barges in with all the joy and hardship, darkness and light, life and death and new life.)

Over and over, every rule of Neal’s is about creating better sentences, cleaner and richer at the same time. A successful metaphor—“love is a rose bush, beautiful and prickly and ephemeral”—enhances its environment, as does taking out a forced one. OceanofPDF.com Twist Clichés We already think in clichés; you owe it to your reader’s search for novelty to remove or deconstruct your hackneyed phrases.

USE CLICHÉS TO YOUR HEART’S desire, but only if you twist them until they bleed. We’re pattern seekers, us humans, and that means that our ideas—our spoken words—rest on hackneyed ideas that are recombined in new ways. Clichés ‘R’ us. We’re spitting out old thoughts all day long. Writers think like everyone else. We have an alphabet, and we also have a canon of idiomatic shortcuts to abstract ideas—adages and stale phrases. (So do musicians. How many times have you heard a jazz soloist blurt out a phrase from a childhood ditty?)

Don’t be scared to write the first thing that comes into your head, which is often a cliché. Later you can exchange it for all-new verbiage. But you might also use the cliché as a starting point and create a zinger out of it, like a comedian taking a mundane experience and throwing in an unexpected variable, getting a laugh.

I might first think, “She was good as gold.” By the time I’ve finished creating the character, the line has changed to “She was good as brass, barely.” A year or so into my newspaper career I was assigned the storm story. Writing about snowstorms in upstate New York is like writing about waves in Waikiki Beach or pit crews at Talladega. But a good-sized blizzard, no matter how much it resembles every other good-sized blizzard, must be placed on the front page.

Every reader expects it; the storm is what everyone is talking about, so it must be news.

Somehow: Thoughts on Love Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage Almost Everything: Notes on Hope Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son’s First Son (with Sam Lamott) Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year FICTION Imperfect Birds Blue Shoe Crooked Little Heart All New People Joe Jones Rosie Hard Laughter OceanofPDF.com OceanofPDF.com an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019 penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2026 by Neal Allen, Anne Lamott Penguin Random House values and supports copyright.

Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. Please note that no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. Avery with colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC Cover design: Jess Morphew Book design by Ashley Tucker, adapted for ebook The excerpt on this page, by R.

W. Apple Jr., is from The New York Times. © 1981 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license. The stanza on this page is from the poem “Ripples on the Surface” from No Nature by Gary Snyder, copyright © 1992 by Gary Snyder. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

All rights reserved. The stanza on this page is from the poem “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe, 1849. The excerpt on this page is from The Overcoat, by Nikolai Gogol, translated by Constance Garnett, 1923. The lyric on this page is from the song “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” written and first recorded by Hank Williams in 1949.

The excerpt on this page is from Conjugating Hindi by Ishmael Reed. Dalkey Archive Press, 2018. An excerpt on this page is from the story “Nights in the Garden of Spain” in Women in Their Beds by Gina Berriault. Counterpoint, 2017. An excerpt on this page is from Less by Andrew Sean Greer. Little, Brown and Company, 2017.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 33e7434f3edf5cd9
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,934,213 bytes (1.845 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9798217046959, 9798217046973
• Pages: 176
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 204.07 minutes
• Total Words: 40,814
• Total Characters: 236,767
• Average Words per Page: 231.9
• Average Characters per Page: 1345.27

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