This is an extraordinary tale and a wonderful piece of journalism.

This is what happens when a Christmas movie plot unfolds in North Idaho: It’s a story that involves armed “patriots,” secret recordings, Fox News, claims of anti-Christian bigotry, reports of vandalism, a lawsuit, a countersuit, depositions and even — a la Miracle on 34th Street — Santa Claus on the witness stand.

If you’ve been online as long as me you’ll know Heather Havrilesky, who wrote for the much-missed Suck.com. Among other things, these days she writes the Ask Polly advice column for The Cut. It’s a frank, insightful and occasionally uncomfortable read.

This week’s edition has caught a lot of people’s attention: it’s powerful stuff. Havrilesky responds to a 35-year-old woman who’s lost her sense of purpose and fears her best days are already behind her. She says:

I used to think I was the one who had it all figured out. Adventurous life in the city! Traveling the world! Making memories! Now I feel incredibly hollow. And foolish. How can I make a future for myself that I can get excited about out of these wasted years?

Havrilesky’s response isn’t perfect (the bit about her own book promotion is jarring), but it includes plenty of sage advice.

It’s okay to be in debt and worried. It’s okay to feel lonely and lost. It’s okay to feel tired of trying. It’s okay to want more and wonder how to get it. You’re just a human, this is how we feel a lot. It’s not irregular or aberrant to feel despair. This is part of survival. Your shame is forming your despair into a merciless story about your worth. Don’t let it do that. Build something else from your shame instead.

…What if you reached out to other people, and friends, and family, and let your shame into the room with you? What if you simply experimented with being who you are, out in the open, even as that feels difficult and awkward and sad?

She asks the writer to imagine herself much older.

You are 95 years old, looking back at your 35-year-old self, and this is what you see: a young woman, so young, so disappointed, even though everything is about to get really good. She doesn’t see how much she’s accomplished, how much she’s learned, how many new joys await her. She doesn’t know how strong she is. She is blindfolded, sitting on a mountain of glittering gems. She is beautiful, but she feels ugly. She has a rich imagination and a colorful past, but she feels poor. She thinks she deserves to be berated because she has nothing. She has everything she needs.

It’s international men’s day today. This, on masculinity, is very good.

There’s nothing wrong with masculinity. But to be a man often means trying to live up to a very narrow definition of what masculinity means, and that can be suffocating if you don’t fit that definition.

Fraser Stewart articulates it very well in this video: by all means be stoic and strong if that’s who you want to be, but don’t try to be somebody you aren’t.

These expectations [of strength and stoicism] are dangerous for the men who feel sad, or feel lonely, or anxious, or depressed, but who have been told throughout their life that to be a man you have to bottle up your feelings, that this is an intrinsic part of your masculinity.

It’s not easy to be a man or a boy, but sometimes we make it harder than it needs to be. It’s okay to be vulnerable, to be sad, to be a man who doesn’t fit in a narrow box marked “stiff upper lip”.

My friend Chris posted an interesting question on Twitter last night.

What would be the worst outcome of your innermost thoughts – not literally ‘your internet history’, but it’s a decent proxy, I guess – being made public? What would be the best?

I’m thinking a lot just now about how we hold onto unvoiced concerns about ourselves, internalised, received-wisdom self-hatred that we daren’t interrogate, making them all huge and black and important… while most people wouldn’t give a damn.

The corollary to ‘everyone around you has a story as rich and deep as yours’ and the implication that this might come as a surprise is that ‘nobody around you thinks your story is particularly important’, and perhaps that can be a catalyst for honesty and growth.

I can answer some of that, because of course my darkest, most terrible secret is no longer a secret: I’m – surprise! – one of those trans people the papers warn you about. And what happens is your fear loses its power. You move from being terrified of anybody even suspecting the slightest hint of your secret to moving through the world without really giving it much thought. Fears lose their power incredibly easily.

So the glib answer is: your life gets better. Not necessarily easier, but better because living a lie is really hard work.

But that’s a pretty extreme example. What about the day to day things, the smaller things we don’t say out loud? As I responded to Chris:

…a lot of secrets are really hard work too. For example, the classic “I’m in love with them but I’m too scared to tell them”. I’ve lost half my life to that one :) 

But there are also everyday ones, the things we don’t always articulate. The love we have for our partners, our friends, our children. The sadness we feel at accidental or not so accidental cruelties of others. The times we’re barely hanging on and desperately need a shoulder to lean on but can’t bring ourselves to ask. 

[total honesty] would also mean people I quite like hearing the less pleasant things I observe about them, so it’s not all good. But my gut is that we silence more valuable stuff than bad stuff. Maybe :)

How many times have you bitten your tongue at something that’s really made you sad, or wanted to tell someone how much they matter but just went red instead?

What would happen if you stopped pretending, if you didn’t censor everything? I don’t mean not censoring anything – I’d be barred from supermarkets if I vocalised what I thought about my fellow shoppers sometimes – but the important things, the things that make you feel things.

What would happen if you were more honestly you?

This is Glasgow’s city of the dead, the Necropolis. It’s also a brilliant place to watch fireworks, which is what the people in the photo were doing last night. I love this shot, it looks more like I’ve stumbled upon some kind of ritual.

My previous post about How To Write Good included some really inelegant pronoun use: I wrote about “she/he” in connection with an unnamed, entirely imaginary writer. That looked and read awfully, so I changed it to “s/he”. Which made it worse.

It turns out that it’s better to avoid gendering things that don’t need to be gendered. Instead of he or she, the singular pronoun “they” is much more elegant.

This is hardly a zany new thing. “They” has been an acceptable singular pronoun for the last 500 years or so, as the Grammarly blog points out:

Merriam-Webster includes usage examples of the singular they dating back to Shakespeare, with notable additions from the likes of Jane Austen and even the traditionalist W. H. Auden.

The blog also features this wonderful bit of trivia.

Unfortunately for prescriptivists, English is constantly changing—and always has been. Some words that grammar pedants scoff at as obnoxious neologisms were in fact coined as long ago as the nineteenth century. Take “dude” for example. Reviled by grammar trolls the world over, this term has provoked the ire of multiple generations of fuddy-duddies. But did you know that it has its roots in late nineteenth-century British dandyism?

One of the reasons we get so excised about gender-neutral pronouns is because of our old pal the patriarchy. Grammarly again:

Traditionally, he was the default pronoun for a person whose gender you didn’t know

He is the default because male is the default: you only need to specify otherwise if the person you’re talking to is not male. That’s just rude.

William Lily there, mansplaining in 1567.

…Using the singular they makes English a more efficient language, and it helps us to avoid awkward sentence constructions. More importantly, it allows you to avoid making assumptions about the gender of a person you don’t know.

It also makes my blog posts slightly better. Everybody wins!

The image is from an excellent blog post by Shane O’Leary, which you can read here.

[Update: My friend Chris Phin, who is an editor and therefore always right, has pointed out that I am of course describing practical writing here, not writing as an art form in its own right. I’d better clarify that before I get picketed by poets.]

Most writing exists for a reason, and that reason is usually to share information. The information might be a warning, or it might be advice, or it might be how to do something. The writer’s job is to share that information in the right way. The right way is usually to simplify it, simplify it, and then simplify some more.

Sometimes we get it wrong by accident. If you’re immersed in a particular world you may have a knowledge and a vocabulary that people outside that world don’t. It’s easy to fall into the trap of using jargon or relying on concepts that you understand but that your readers might not. It’s an honest mistake and we all do it.

Sometimes, though, it’s deliberate. It’s the writer deciding that the message they really need to communicate is “I am clever!” or “I have read a book!”

And that’s where terrible writing comes from.

I recently read a live review that said:

They have appeal and they appeal to us. Through the sociologically objective to the psychological subjectivism of introspection: Moving from the political protest to mind games of the self.

That’s not writing. That’s not even typing.

Writing is usually there to do a job, to answer a question: how do I make this work? What did the government decide today? What do you think about this topic? Should you see this band if they’re playing near you?

Answering those questions doesn’t mean you must write in a boring way. But it does mean that you must answer the question you were asked, not the question you wish you had been asked. For example, a live review is supposed to answer the question “what was the gig like?” and perhaps tell you if you should get tickets for the next date.

Good writing needn’t be dull writing. Here’s the late Douglas Adams describing spaceships.

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way bricks don’t.

That’s very simple writing, but it’s doing a ton of work. It’s a joke, of course. But it’s also a very effective description. These aren’t the sleek, silvery spaceships of most speculative fiction. These are bricks. Awful ships. Tedious ships. Ugly, utilitarian, unloveable ships. These are the sort of ships you get when you’re English, in England, in the 1980s. The kind of spaceships your local council would commission. Spaceships that probably close for no reason every third Wednesday. Spaceships full of traffic cones and No Ball Games signs.

All that in just 13 words.

And of course, there’s the famous probably-not-by-Hemingway six word story:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

These are from fiction, of course. There isn’t as much room for humour or imagination in more everyday kinds of writing. But you can still say an awful lot without very many words. For example:

Signs are a great example, because their job is to impart information in the simplest possible way. This sign doesn’t have time for big words and lyrical flourishes. What is dangerous, and why should you keep out? We don’t have time for that! There is danger! You must keep out!

Alliterate by all means. Sprinkle metaphors like malt vinegar on the crinkle-cut chips that comprise your copy. Demonstrate your vocabulary with sesquipedalian style. But never forget that your words are there to do a job, and if they don’t do that job then you’re wasting everybody’s time.

As the Swedish popsters Roxette once put it: don’t bore us, get to the chorus!

As you may have noticed, the new series of Doctor Who starts tonight. I was never a Whovian – I watched it as a child and the rebooted series never appealed to me – but thanks to my daughter I’ve rediscovered it and realised what a great show it can be.

Tonight isn’t just about the return of the show, though. It’s the first time a woman, the excellent Jodie Whittaker, has played The Doctor. For my daughter, that’s incredible: someone exactly like her (smart, funny, kick-ass and female) having the lead role in her favourite show.

Some boys moaned about “a TARDIS full of bras”, of course, because having one female lead out of thirteen is political correctness gone too far. Apparently a show about a near-immortal shape-shifting time-travelling space alien is totally realistic, but having that alien assume female form is too far-fetched.

It’s their loss: as my friend Karl Hodge writes, the Doctor is a great character. Irrespective of his, her or their pronouns.

Marks & Spencer has launched a new “easy dressing” range for children. The clothes are largely identical to the rest of the retailer’s children’s clothing (there’s a school uniform section too), but there are some crucial differences. Some have been tailored to make extra room for leg or arm casts, or have pockets with concealed bits for feeding tubes. They’re made using exceptionally soft materials, the care labels are hidden to avoid irritation and a great deal of thought has gone into each time. And crucially, they don’t cost extra.

Rebecca Garner is M&S’s kidswear designer.

“Parents passionately told us that disabilities don’t define their children, so the adaptations shouldn’t define their clothes, it’s why all the products are inclusively designed and modelled closely on our main collection.

“So whilst big sister might wear a dress with sequins, the little one who wants to match but has sensory needs will have a softer glitter.”

I’m an M&S shopper anyway – as much as I like to think there’s a punk rock edge to me, I’m actually at home in M&S and Sainsbury’s – but the brand has just rocketed in my estimation. The new range is a little bit of M&S’s clothing business, but it’s a very big deal to the kids (and their parents) who’ll benefit from it.