Jonah Goldberg once related a piece of advice a mentor gave him—one of those little tricks of the trade that writers pass along to each other—to wit, to read and then write about what made him angry. And certainly if one is devoted to the daily column or (in my own case) the daily post, there is worse advice. Indeed, many of the posts in this return to the blog have been incited by my frustration with a general public habit of failure to think things through.
But perhaps a better piece of advice, when it comes to
looking for things to say—whether one is a pundit like Goldberg or a blogger or
a student (heaven help you) in Mrs. Finburg’s first year writing class—is to
read and then to write about what got your blood going. That could be anger, but it could also be amusement,
agreement, curiosity, confusion, sadness, joy, disdain, humiliation …
Good ideas, I think, have to come from some sort of
engagement with the text; and for any normal person (present company excepted)
that usually means first an emotional engagement. Indeed, even for people who are habituated to
approaching things from a rational standpoint, the emotions frequently run
ahead before the logical analysis. It’s
simply how human beings are made.
Good ideas, in fact, have the same birthplace as bad ideas:
in the gut, in the heart.
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