What Every Writer (And Politician) Can Learn From Shel Silverstein.
By: Robert Cormack
Tags: Shel Silverstein, Political Correctness, Marketing, Writing, News

“What you’ve got to say, you say.” Shel Silverstein

As simple as Shel Silverstein’s poems may seem, they were a daily struggle for this writer of at least eight published children’s books, a dozen albums, two Grammy award-winning songs and numerous screenplays. He was a constant revisionist, what some might call a niggler. Every poem and lyric used the fewest words possible, including this one about life itself:

Oh, if you’re a bird, be an early bird/ And catch the worm for your breakfast plate/If you’re a bird, be an early bird — /But if you’re a worm, sleep late

Describing Silverstein as a children’s book author misses the significance of this simplicity. Adults reading his stories to their kids soon find themselves moved without perhaps understanding why. In The Giving Tree, for instance, there’s something so universal about the tree “giving without consideration of itself,” that it speaks to all of us (parents in particular).

Keep it short, make sure a thirteen-year-old can understand it. That doesn’t mean talking down, it actually means talking up, respecting the reader’s time and ultimately their patience.

In our complicated lives, where we’re filled without filling, busy without learning, Silverstein’s words make more than sense — they make us realize how profound simplicity is, and so contrary to “mass without meaning.” We live with mass and meaninglessness. Silverstein made a point of meaning.

There’s a rule in Reader’s Digest: Keep it short, make sure a thirteen-year-old can understand it. That doesn’t mean talking down, it actually means talking up, respecting the reader’s time and ultimately their patience. This helped explain Silverstein’s book Falling Up. We spend more time worrying about being respected and admired, adding volume instead of brevity.

Maybe that’s the problem today. We aren’t reading words that respect our time. Take a headline like “You’ll never have to ask for love again.” I started reading this article, only to be more confused at the end than I was at the beginning:

“To judge yourself kindly is to feel worthy and respected and appreciated, and that’s when you’re open to receiving love instead of constantly having to ask for it, which is when you stop doubting your ability to BE loved and find the love you always desired.”

A worm that loves attracts many worms, and they’ll get eaten first.

I’m all for finding love and fulfillment, but I got lost. Why couldn’t the writer just say: “If you love yourself, others will figure you must be onto something.” Isn’t that the basis of love? Or as Silverstein might have written: A worm that loves attracts many worms, and they’ll get eaten first.

It’s also interesting how writers can fall back on worn-out phrases, turning interesting thoughts into professional monotony:

“As more and more individuals and organizations become semi-proficient on these various platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram in particular) are we destined to endure one long streaming feed of incessant babbling?”

Isn’t what we’ve just read “incessant babbling”?

It’s like René Descartes and his: “I think, therefore I am.” Hundreds of years later, he’s still a genius, and we get nothing for writing in a washroom cubicle: “I think, therefore I flush.”

“What you’ve got to say, you say,” Shel Silverstein once summarized. Who among us doesn’t admire that kind of brevity? And who among us isn’t telling themselves “I could have come up with that.”

It’s like René Descartes and his: “I think, therefore I am.” Hundreds of years later, he’s still a genius. Even variations of that theme on a washroom cubicle gets at least a chuckle: “I think, therefore I flush.”

So why do we tangle our words? Why do platitudes constantly sneak into our sentences? The answer to the second is wrapped up in the first. Tangled words seem to cut off our supply of common sense.

After the Las Vegas shootings, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority put out the following billboard: “We’ve been there for you during the good times. Thank you for being there for us now.” Someone wrote this one word response: “Goosebumps.” That gave him goosebumps?

Considering the nuttiness that exists today, you’d think our writing would at least be as colourful. Yet we fall back on worn-out phrases all the time.

I got goosebumps seeing people take a direct flight to Nunavut rather than hang around McCarran airport that day. I mean, if a mentally threadbare accountant can take 16 assault weapons into a hotel, imagine the level of weaponry in the airport’s executive lounge.

Considering the nuttiness that exists today, you’d think our writing would at least be as colourful. Yet we fall back on worn-out phrases instead.

I think back to authors like James Thurber and E.B. White who could spend a week on one paragraph.

Hunter S. Thompson once typed out the entire “The Great Gatsby,” just to understand the rhythms and compactness of Fitzgerald’s writing. He had good reason. Here’s just one line from Fitzgerald’s greatest novel:

“When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of mortal attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”

We’d rather take comfort in knowing we didn’t offend anybody than having a unique thought.

Think of how the rest of us write. How often do we spend more time qualifying our thoughts, hoping not to offend, than on the thought itself?

At the beginning of my career, I wrote In Memoriams for a country radio station. The funeral homes would call in the details with the same words of condolence every time. These days, it seems like we’re doing the identical thing. We trot out old words and phrases like they’re death notices.

One writer who continually writes great copy is Dave Barry, former humorist with the Miami Herald. When asked to defend the media’s coverage of the stock market, Barry explained it this way:

“Perhaps you wonder how come we here in the news media always make such a big deal about the stock market. The answer is simple: We don’t understand it. We have an old saying in journalism: ‘If you don’t understand something, it must be important.’”

The great thing about Dave Barry is he doesn’t sound like everyone else. Rather than tangle his words, he makes them funny. Somehow it comes across as true — or at least asinine — which is often truth as well.

Surely, we can do better than funeral homes

Perhaps that’s what we all need in our writing. We need a little truth, a little asinine bravery, and, perhaps, something funny. Otherwise, we’ll continue sounding like those In Memoriams.

Surely, we can do better than funeral homes. We need to stop tangling and abusing words. We need to become simple-ists like Shel Silverstein. Look how he handled the difference between rich and poor:

The little fish eats the tiny fish/The big fish eats the little fish — /So only the big fish get fat/ Do you know any folks like that?

Who but Shel Silverstein could explain American economics so simply—and completely? Some might call it child-like, but compared to the descriptions given by politicians these days, I’m more inclined to stick to Silverstein.

Perhaps if we all took a lesson from this, we’d understand economics—and life—a whole lot better than we do now. Obviously, we don’t. I blame the tangle of words, the obfuscation present in so much of what we read and hear.

Maybe we all need to sit down with The Giving Tree (hopefully again) instead of reading newspapers or social media. Maybe then we’ll understand what clarity and brevity really means. Otherwise we doomed to repeat the platitudes—the meatless, pointless nonsense—we’re engaged in now.

Robert Cormack is a satirist, novelist, and former advertising copywriter. His first novel “You Can Lead a Horse to Water (But You Can’t Make It Scuba Dive)” is available online and at most major bookstores. Check out Skyhorse Press or Simon and Schuster for more details.