Dear Mr. Keillor,

I am 38, a Ph.D. candidate in U.S. history for three years at Kent State. I'm writing my dissertation on U.S. civil defense during the Cold War and how gendered language led those efforts to fail. I have written...about 35 pages.

It seems like every few months, I hear about another contemporary earning his or her doctorate, and even though I know I'm a good writer, I'm feeling increasingly inadequate and hopeless.

My question is this: how do you pacify the voices in your head that conspire to make you feel like whatever you write will not be good enough? That if your work is not perfect, even the first time, it means you are an abject failure? In other words, how do you make peace with the omnipresent potential for mediocrity?

Sincerely,
Melissa Steinmetz, a Perfectionist Ph.D. Candidate with Procrastination Problems  

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Welcome to the club, Melissa. A lot of us get discouraged looking at the mess we've made on paper. And one can make an even worse mess on a screen, sprawling windy pretentious paragraphs that any sensible reader would automatically leap over. Writing on a computer is an exercise in mediocrity, if you ask me. Just keep telling yourself: the first draft has to come before the second and the third. All good writing is rewriting. If you're writing on a computer, print out hard copy and revise it with a pencil and then type the revisions into the digital version. Don't give up. There is an embittered editor up in your brain who expects your first draft to be classic literature. Tell him to sit on it and spin. Finish the dissertation before you're 40, kid. At 40, take a year off and work as a chanteuse in a roadhouse, leaning against the baby grand in your little black dress slit up to the thighs, a cigarette in your left hand, singing bittersweet ballads for lovelorn truckdrivers.

Dear Mr. Keillor,

My Bar Mitzvah is this weekend. I need to make a speech. Do you have any advice? Start with a joke?

Ari Rotenberg
Houston TX

p.s. If you're in Houston this weekend, you're welcome to come and bring a friend.

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Dear Ari, We Christians don't have any tradition like this, the Goodbye To Childhood You're On Your Own Now ceremony, but it does strike me that you should've been thinking about this LONG BEFORE NOW, no? Am I wrong? But a joke is fine. Here are two.

You always want to begin a joke by saying, "So!" Pause two beats. Then the joke.

So. There was a big bar mitzvah outdoors in a backyard and all the bees went to enjoy the fresh flowers and fruit and they made sure to wear yarmulkes so people would know they were bees and not wasps.

So. God told his angels he was going away for the weekend and the angels said, "Are you going to visit Earth?" And God said no. "I went down there a couple thousand years ago and got a Jewish girl pregnant and they're still talking about it."

Congratulations and mazel tov and l'chaim, Ari.

Sir:

I spent last summer writing and painting with my lover in Normandy. Now she wants to go to the Alps to ski. I don't ski. Our relationship is at the point where I don't want to embarrass myself or disappoint her. How can I get out of this one? I have suggested a pilgrimage to Spain.

Paul

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I am in pain in your behalf, Paul. I hate to say this, but there is no alternative. The pilgrimage isn't happening. You are going to go skiing in the Alps. You will do this with great bravado and you are going to break your leg. I hope you break it in a good place, a simple break that doesn't require an orthopedic surgeon and a four-hour operation and the insertion of steel rods that mean you'll set off metal detectors for the next forty years and have to be patted down at airports. She will feel enormous guilt at what she made you do and she'll admire your fortitude and the way you lay patiently on the slope, your leg bent at that horrible angle, and the way you endured the emergency-room doctor setting the bone (kkkkkkkkkkrackkkkk) and how you've done everything your physical therapist asked. Your p.t. will be a willowy blonde named Amber who holds you in her arms as you do the crunches and leg lifts and your lover is a little jealous. She marries you in the spring. In the summer you learn that you will be a father. Life hurtles forward and hazards fly past us and down we go, just like on a ski slope. I wish you well.