The Hamilton Papers, №1

How did Alexander Hamilton do it?

In a time where I, like a lot of us, have more free time than ever, I can barely start writing articles, let alone finish them. On the other end of the spectrum, as told by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton seems to have had the opposite problem.

It’s true: Hamilton did kick his writing into another gear when it came to defending, and advocating for, what would eventually become the Constitution of the United States. He said “sayonara” to the original plan to write 25 essays that made up The Federalist Papers and almost doubled that on his own.

In the end, he wrote 51 essays of the 85 essays that were published by Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, all using the collective pseudonym “Publius”. By the way, I don’t want to just skip over Madison. To his credit, he also tore up the original plan before going on to author 29 essays of his own.

This incredible productivity and pace at which they wrote is almost unbelievable to me (and, frankly, I’m incredibly jealous of it). Sure, I have the excuse of not writing to help form an entire government, but I still wanted to find some way to enhance my own efficiency in producing articles.

So, to try to pull myself out of my most recent and long-lasting spell of writer’s block, I turned to my best friend: Google. After less than ten minutes, I found four tips that are helping me write this article right now.

The first deals with the opener, which I read being described as having just one purpose: to get the audience to read the next sentence.

It makes sense, and it phrased it in a way that triggered a different way of thinking about it. I have always know that the opening “attention getter” is crucial, but I had never thought of it in terms of a conversation or talking to a real person, which is actually the second tip.

Being like a conversation doesn’t necessarily mean writing out complete dialogue or a question-response format; it’s more about visualization and anticipation.

The way I understood it, it means picturing who your target reader of your article will be. This might be a single dad, a mom of 3, a college athlete, etc. As you write your article, picture them and always ask yourself “what would they want to know?” For example, my overall target reader for this article was struggling writers, and for the conversation piece of this, I imagined that at the end of the last paragraph, you’d be asking “what does he mean by visualization and anticipation?”

The third tip was a little more difficult for me to adjust to. If you’ve gone through schooling at any point in the last decade, you’ll know how MEAT, TIQAT, or a similar acronym is pushed and ingrained in us. In the case of MEAT, M = main point, E = example, A = analysis, and T = transition.

Maybe I took it too literally, but I always felt a it boxed in by that. However, since that style was rooted in my mind, it’s been hard to implement tip #3: keep paragraphs short.

There are many benefits that this provides, but the main one is that it makes your writing more appealing to the reader and easier to digest (it also improves search engine optimization for your article, but that’s a topic for a future story).

We’ve all looked at a textbook, or just a regular book, where each paragraph was about a page long. It’s a daunting thing to read, and probably requires a few deep breaths before jumping in.

The other end of the spectrum is how I’ve tried to write this article. It feels really unnatural to have 1–2 sentences in a paragraph (and maybe this article seems weirdly segmented since I’m still getting used to it), or to split up a paragraph even if you’re still talking about the same topic, but it’s very freeing when you get in the rhythm of it. It even leaves the reader wanting more by not finishing an idea by the end of a paragraph.

Speaking of difficult adjustments, the fourth tip, edit later and keep pushing through, has been one of the most tricky techniques to master.

My biggest writing flaw, and the reason behind most of my discouragement, is that I’ve never truly grasped the concept of “drafts”. Whether it’s OCD or trying to be a perfectionist, I have the awful habit of editing while writing, and it just makes the process so much longer and more tedious.

It’s a hard habit to break, but I’m trying to do so by a mix of highlighting, underlining, and starring things I want to come back to later. It could be a statistic I need to look up, an idea I need to wrap up, or even a word I think I’m overusing.

So far, I’m really liking this change the most because inspiration and ideas are fleeting for me, and I need to catch the lightning in the bottle while I can. It’s much nicer to get everything on the paper or screen first and do the research or tune-ups at the end, rather than burning all that energy and still having to write a conclusion.

Fittingly, those (good opener, write like a conversation, keep paragraphs short, edit at the end) are all the quick fixes I have to discuss at the moment. Even if they’re not necessarily related to my current events theme, I’d like to put more of these honest, behind the scenes articles out there to help anyone who’s in the same situation.

Who knows, maybe I’ll group them all together and call them The Hamilton Papers?