Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

7The More the Think, the Easier the Ink

“It's not the ink—it's the think,” wrote New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff, when asked 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 wrote on the New Yorker blog. “There really is no trick—you just have to think of them.”¹

Mankoff's think-before-ink mnemonic is easily applied to the first and second GPS checkpoints of writing too: distilling an idea, and reframing it for your reader. (An aside—it would also be a great 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, and plan for it, the easier it is to say.

Figuring out what you want to say before you figure out how to say it seems an obvious first step. But many writers tend to shortchange that step—they instead charge straight at the water and wade in, slogging through the surf until pretty soon they're out of their depth and they're flailing around wondering how they ended up there at all.

“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,” 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 ...