Everybody Writes, 2nd Edition



13Think Before Ink

“It's not the ink—it's the think,” wrote former New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff¹ in response to a question about the secret to drawing the magazine's iconic cartoons.

“As cartoon editor, I'm often asked how to get ideas for cartoons by people who want to submit them to the New Yorker,” Mankoff writes. “There really is no trick—you just have to think of them.”

Mankoff's think-before-ink mnemonic is easily applied to the first and second GPS checkpoints of writing too: distilling an idea, reframing it for your reader. (“Think before ink” would also be the perfect tagline for a tattoo studio.)

Mankoff's deliberately oversimplified answer reveals a fundamental truth about cartoons, and about any content: The more you think about what you want to say, the easier it is to say.

It sounds obvious, doesn't it? Figuring out what you want to say before you figure out how to say it?

But many of us tend to shortchange that first step. Instead, we charge straight at the water and wade in, slogging through the surf until pretty soon we're out of our depth and flailing about, wondering how did we end up here?

“If I'm really struggling, it's usually not about the writing—it's about the thinking: I just don't really have the story down yet,” marketer Doug Kessler told me. “So more research or groping with the outline can unstick me.

“If I do know the story but I'm just dopey or sleepy or grumpy (my preferred dwarf personas), I give it a ...