Stacey Gross

Sedaris as Example

David Sedaris is the most brilliant man alive. 

Thank god that man picked up a pen and never put it down. 

David Sedaris can write a funny story about anything, because David Sedaris can tell any story in the world, because to David Sedaris, everything is a story. 

David Sedaris sees the world through the eyes of a writer. He listens intensely. He watches people. He watches their faces. He watches them on trains, as they do the thousand little things they do with their hands, and their feet, and the sleeves of their jackets, that they are never once aware they are doing. 

While he’s doing this, David Sedaris is thinking and infusing these little tells and mannerisms, baptizing them in the churning impressions, jokes, wisdoms, and insights that spring forward as this whole alchemical process happens. 

Then, David Sedaris thinks the first lines of his next essay in his head. Aloud, to himself, inside his own brain. He says the words, aloud, to himself. Then he takes out a little notebook and writes that first sentence or two down. 

And finally, because David Sedaris is magic, he takes that little notebook out of his pocket at the end of the day, and sits himself down in front of a screen and a keyboard and he concentrates on all the tiny sensations and perceptions he had, as he watched whatever interaction that lit his candle go down, and he just lets the words flow uninhibited from his brain to his fingertips to the world. 

The Complications

Now, it’s not that simple as all that. The boy may be a mythical creature but I guarantee you he feels the same infatuated revulsion toward a thesaurus that anyone who’s ever fallen ill with the cellular love of language itself knows well. 

I guarantee you David Sedaris has days when he wants to toss his little notebook into a dumpster and follow up with a match. I don’t care what he says, though I’m sure if you asked him he’d tell you the truth, that sometimes it sucks being a writer because there is often no way to shutter the sensations and perceptions that invade you daily. 

I bet there are whole days, you guys, where David Sedaris wants to just get on the train and go to work and do the things and come home and watch Nightline with Hugh and go to sleep and do it all over again the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and the next, without ever spending one iota of cognitive energy noticing the way a stranger clutches her pocketbook to her chest on the train in Paris. 

Some people have said that David Sedaris has this superpower that no one else has which enables him to make a wildly loved essay out of literally anything at all. Or, more accurately, out of less than nothing. 

The supid little interactions and impressions that thrust themselves upon us day in and day out? Those made David Sedaris one of the most celebrated humorists in American history. No one else can make this stuff interesting, they say. 

I say nonsense. 

The Voice Within

I say anybody can do that. You can spend fifty grand on a writing degree, and I encourage anyone who’s ever considered doing so it to do it because you will never make back enough money to escape debt but if you’ve got the grit for that ramen lifestyle then let me tell you that there is no better way on this earth to live as fully as possible every single day of your broke, anxious life than to steep yourself in an elemental understanding of stories, and of storytelling, and of why they matter more than almost everything else in the world. 

David Sedaris has this knowledge.

David Sedaris has a funny way of speaking. Literally and in the more colloquial sense, David’s voice, as the author of his best work, is uniquely his. The best compliment I’ve ever gotten from a reader was a retweet of a column I did recently for Your Daily Local that said, in essence, “you’ve got to hear her read it.”

While the greatest scholars of our time seem to struggle in breaking down what makes David so wildly Sedaris at making you giggle uncontrollably over your morning coffee, or your evening whiskey, or whatever it is you drink to get you through your day, what it is, in fact, is quite simple: 

David writes like he talks. 

David’s work is so much like George Carlin’s, which makes it even better because while we’re on the subject of male role models in my wasted life, Carlin also ranks in the top three. These men were the masters of harnessing their own internal monologues and making them not just tangible, but salable. 

Now, no one is ever going to be able to write like David Sedaris, but it is my firm belief that every single one of us is intensely capable of writing as well as David Sedaris, though in wildly different ways. 

The Quiet Within

We all have this quiet part within ourselves. This silent little passenger, observing it all. Taking it all in, and thinking about it, and constructing beliefs and opinions – the very framework of our entire mental beings – and then reading it all back to us in riveting detail. Telling us gently what it’s learned. It just speaks so awfully softly. 

One of the first things I did once I got through the first few Intro to Writing classes during my undergraduate degree at Clarion University was to make a little pentagram out of pencil nubs and spent erasers and channel the spirit of Hunter Thompson. 

Not really, but understand that if I knew how to Black Magick I would have Black Magicked that beast right back into our world because he, too, is a prophet and deserves to be read with depth, and reverence. 

Listen to David Sedaris read this essay, in this clip. Listen to his words, and the way he anticipates the audience’s reactions, leads them to them by the hand, without their ever having been aware of it. 

Now how do you think he does that? 

The same way he holds audiences captivated at book signings and events where he shares of himself generously in so many organic and spontaneous ways. He’s famous for being one of the most gracious authors both to host, as a professor or administrator, but also to adore, as a reader. 

David Sedaris is the same person on the page as he is in the flesh and either way he is delightful. He’s sassy and mouthy, but so gentle as he pummels the silliness of humans as a species into us and we beg, beg for more. 

Become Your Own

You don’t have to write like David Sedaris. It would sound silly if you did because from the first few seconds of that clip you know that no one on earth could ever inhabit that man’s voice but David Sedaris himself. 

But you have a voice that’s every bit as unique and powerful. It’s the voice you use to tell your best friend an inconvenient truth because she needs to hear it. Or the one you whip out to break down graduate-level moral philosophy to your eight-year-old daughter. 

Do this thing: Whatever you’re working on right now, at this very moment, put it aside. Just for one day, put it in a drawer and don’t think about it. And just do everything else. Do all the other things you have to do. Go to work. Feed your kids. Shop for groceries. Put gas in your car. 

But the whole time, when you’re doing all those things, even if it seems like nothing is happening at all around you, force yourself to be acutely, painfully aware of it all. 

Let that quiet part of your brain just drink in all the invisible miracles and tragedies that happen all around us, every single day, that no one ever notices. Let your brain soak it all up, and just do what it does and if the first sentence of a story or an essay pops into your head pull out a notebook, or a napkin, or the back of a receipt that’s long enough to do it because you spent too much money at Burlington and you’re not even sorry about it. 

The back of your hand. 

Columns that have won me awards have started as Bic scribbles on the back of my hand at a time when I could afford to give them literally no greater measure of my time or attention. 

Just write down the first sentence and then relax some more. Just let it simmer until later that night. When you’re just sitting around or doing whatever it is that you do. And commit to sit in front of your screen or your device, or whatever you use to do your writing, and just let your fingers type that sentence or that fragment of a thought onto the first line of the first page of the next whatever it is you’re about to write. 

And then stop thinking altogether and let the thought carry on uninhibited, and just use your fingers like a camera, and put every thought and image and word on the page. 

The more you do it, the bolder that quiet little part of yourself will become until eventually she never shuts up and you’ve got 800 stories with your name on them that have been published somewhere because guess what? 

You can make stories out of literally anything at all. Or nothing.

Just like David Sedaris.