“Do you put symbolism in your writing?”

“Not if I can help it.”

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Or they say, “I could write a book about that.” I doubt it. Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.

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Don’t worry about whether the reader will “get it” if you indulge a sudden impulse for humor. If it amuses you in the act of writing, put it in. You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for. If you lose the dullards back n the dust, you don’t want them anyway.

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The perfect ending should take readers slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly right.

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Don’t say you were a bit confused and sort of tired and a little depressed and somewhat annoyed. Be confused. Be tired. Be depressed. Be annoyed. Don’t hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident.

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There’s no subject you don’t have permission to write about. Students often avoid subjects close to their heart because they assume that their teacher will regard those topics as “stupid.” No area of life is stupid to someone who takes it seriously. If you follow your affections you will write well and will engage your readers.

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Nobody turns so quickly into a bore as a traveler home from his travels. He enjoyed his trip so much that he wants to tell us all about it – and “all” is what we don’t want to hear. We only want to hear some. What made his trip different from everybody else’s? What can he tell us that we don’t already know? We don’t want him to describe every ride at Disneyland, or tell us that the Grand Canyon is awesome, or that Venice has canals. If one of the rides at Disneyland got stuck, if somebody fell into the awesome Grand Canyon, that would be worth hearing about.

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Towns situated in hills are nestled – I hardly ever read about an unnestled town in the hills – and the countryside is dotted with byways, preferably half forgotten.

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Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly can write clearly, about anything at all.

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But that would have been a sermon, and sermons are the death of humor.

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Evidently Trump’s philosophy of wellness is rooted in a belief that prolonged exposure to exceptionally attractive young spa attendants will instill in the male clientele a will to live. Accordingly, he limits his role to a pocket veto of key hiring decisions. While giving me a tour of the main exercise room, where Tony Bennett, who does a couple of gigs at Mar-a-Lago each season and had been designated an “artist-in-residence,” was taking a brisk walk on a treadmill, Trump introduced me to “our resident physician, Dr. Giner Lee Southall” – a recent chiropractic-college graduate. As Dr. Giner, out of earshot, manipulated the sore back of a grateful member, I asked Trump where she had done her training. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Baywatch Medical School? Does that sound right? I’ll tell you the truth. Once I saw Dr. Ginger’s photograph, I didn’t really need to look at her resume or anyone else’s. Are you asking, ‘Did we hire her because she trained at Mount Sinai for fifteen years? The answer is no. And I’ll tell you why: because by the time she’s spent fifteen years at Mount Sinai, we don’t want to look at her.”

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Always use “that” unless it makes your meaning ambiguous. If your sentence needs a comma to achieve its precise meaning, it probably needs “which.” “Which” serves a particular identifying function, different from “that.” (a) Take the shoes that are in the closet. This means: take the shoes that are in the closet, not the ones under the bed. (b) Take the shoes, which are in the closet. Only one pair of shoes is under discussion; the “which” usage tells you where they are.

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Flying from Minneapolis from the West, you see it as a theological problem.

The great flat farms of Minnesota are laid out in a ruled gird, as empty of surprises as a sheet of graph paper. Every gravelled path, every ditch has been projected along the latitude and longitude lines of the township-and-range-survey system. The farms are a square, the fields are square, the houses are square; if you could pluck their roofs off from over people’s heads, you’d see families sitting at square tables in the dead center of square rooms. Nature has been stripped, shaven, drilled, punished and repressed in this right-angled, right-thinking Lutheran country. It makes you ache for the sight of a rebellious curve or the irregular, dappled color of a field where a careless farmer has allowed corn and soybeans to cohabit.

But there are no careless farmers on this flight path. The landscape is open to your inspection – as to God’s – as an enormous advertisement for the awful rectitude of the people. There are no funny goings-on down here, it says; we are plain upright fold, fit candidates for heaven.

Then the river enters the picture – a broad serpentine shadow that sprawls unconformably across the checkerboard. Deviously winding, riddled with black sloughs and green cigar-shaped islands, the Mississippi looks as if it had been put here to teach the god-fearing Midwest a lesson about stubborn and unregenerate nature. Like John Calvin’s bad temper, it presents itself as the wild beast in the heart of the heartland.

When people who live on the river attribute a gender to the Mississippi, they do so without whimsy, and nearly always they give it their own sex. “You better respect the river, or he’ll do you in,” growls the lockmaster. “She’s mean – she’s had a lot of people from round here,” says the waitress at the lunch counter. When Eliot wrote that the river is within us (as the sea is all about us), he was nailing something true in an everyday way about the Mississippi. People do see its muddy turmoil as a bodying-forth of their own turbulent inner selves. When they boast to strangers about their river’s wantonness, its appetite for trouble and destruction, its floods and drownings, there’s a not in their voices that says, I have it in me to do that … I know how it feels.