No Yattering

By Erika Hoffman

Everyone’s full of… advice. I’m no exception. I used to aspire to be Ann Landers when I was a little girl, even though I swore she composed many of those astounding letters herself. Now as an old grown-up, I believe every letter was genuine. Folks do have weird problems. And folks seek advice even from strangers or from newspaper columnists that may or may not be the person in the boxed photo.

Advice comes and goes. The best advice today is out of vogue tomorrow. Nonetheless, there are certain cliched opinions that are evergreen. One— my dad used to say decades ago— I still go by. The other one is a quotation by a famous French literary elite from another century.

First, here’s my dad’s advice, which is humdrum and repeated by many, especially older generations: Never talk politics or religion at the dinner table and especially not at Thanksgiving when you are with extended family you see once a year. This taboo everyone knows, and yet fewer and fewer folks abide by. Like everyone else, I have my opinions, but because I know my brother has a diametrically opposed take-on-the-world, I am loathe to broach any topic that might offend him or worse cause him to plunge into a rant. His harangues launch into esoteric binges. If one makes the smallest, most incidental of statements, you are off to the races and beaten into submission by a barrage of opinions!

Also, with people I don’t know well, I keep the conversation light or humorous and usually self-deprecating. Why ruin a friendship or a potential friendship by discussing religious mores or the faux pas tendencies of politicians you don’t know and who don’t care about you? Don’t spoil your life. Some of my best pals don’t hold my political views and aren’t the same religion as I am. So what? Find what you have in common and keep the discussions on those things. One has far more in common with one’s fellow human than imagined.

I also keep this hackneyed piece of advice from Dad in mind when I write. I don’t write about politics or religion. I want my stories to resonate with people. I don’t need any “Atta boys” nor do I want any trolls trailing me home cyber-style.

The other piece of valuable advice I adhere to I have hanging on a card over my computer. It’s by the Frenchman, Voltaire. It says, “The secret of being a Bore is to tell everything.”  You must make your readers curious if they are going to turn pages. Of course, mysteries revolve around the principle of not divulging whodunit until the end. Most personal essays could benefit from the application of this piece of advice, too. You want your story to resonate with the reader; you don’t want your story to read like a series of diary entries. It must have some suspense. It must have a hook. It must make one have bated breath a little bit of the time. 

At dinner parties, where I’m not going to discuss religion or politics, I’m also going to remember not to go into a recital of my day’s goings-on. I don’t jump from tangent to tangent and tell every little iota of my life, which at times is extremely yawn-inducing. I don’t tell everything, every little picayune thing! I don’t want to bore. Also, I don’t want to be bored; I tend to avoid folks who are too much of an open book. Being with people who are guilty of divulging too much personal information is as annoying as being with those types who are so guarded and secretive that behind closed doors you refer to them as the clam and the oyster. Some degree of sharing is necessary for a friendship, but oversharing leads to boredom. Having no filter can be an obstacle to creating a bond with another. An air of mystique is not a bad thing!

So, advice my dad has given me I adhere to in social situations and in my writing as well. Know your audience. Yet, if you don’t, then try to engage them with universal themes, timeless messages, emotion- evoking narratives like the one about the Velveteen Rabbit, which a priest retold at my son’s wedding— making me burst into tears. (Not what you want to do at your son’s wedding!) Above all, don’t bore your readers, and if you can’t help yourself and must bestow advice on them, then give ‘em something worthwhile, like Johnny Carson’s eloquent counsel: Never, Ever, Ever Fry Bacon in the Nude! Believe me, tell ’em that piece of wisdom, and in the future whenever they cook bacon, they’ll remember that useful advice and… you too!

Erika Hoffman has been published over 430 times. Mostly, she pens non-fiction narratives, pieces on writing, and travel articles. Yet, she did create a mystery entitled WHY MAMA, published by LPP in 2019.