Maybe it’s a Jewish thing – the result of having my foreskin snipped while my aunts and uncles noshed on pickled herring – but I always get a little bit wary when people start talking about tips.

Don’t get me wrong, some tips are worth repeating – show, don’t tell; get rid of adverbs; intellect can make you forget that a great arsenic lobster could fall suddenly on your head. But whenever I hear myself offering these to my students, they always sound like oversimplified rules.

And yet to claim that a tip is simplistic is to overlook the tensions of the word, to ignore that wonderful diner scene in Reservoir Dogs – Mr. White arguing that a tip is our moral obligation, part of our civic duty; Mr. Pink refusing to pitch in a buck after his meal, to see the tip as anything more than the humblest of suggestions.

Hemmingway suggested that a story ought to resemble the tip of an iceberg – claim some of her submerged gravitas – the glance on its way to becoming a glimpse, the deep vision emerging from a limited view.

I’ve always found icebergs a bit too cold for my liking, but I do like their slipperiness – the way they slant two ways at once – like so many of my favorite words. Tip, for example, can mean both to remove and to furnish, which reminds me of a teacher I once had who used to make us revise sections from our drafts that we’d already cut – rework the language, imagery and pathos of scenes that we knew would never make it back into our stories.

I struggled with these exercises until I realized that they were giving me permission to play. And when I look back at my notebooks from his class, I love that my teacher never offered any straightforward advice – instead of perfect spirals, every suggestion was like a tipped pass up for grabs.

The other day, conferencing with a student, I offered her the oldest tip in the book: write what you know. 

And yet when I write, it’s not knowing that interests me but the feeling of almost knowing – that sensation of a word on the tip of my tongue – the gap that is intensely active, as William James writes, that tingling with the sense of our closeness.

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