Everything I Was Told About Writing Was Wrong

Hi, there.

It is a pleasure to correspond with you, writer-a-writer.  I sometimes tell my students that no matter what else might make us different (my great height and musculature, winning smile and trust-fund confidence), what gives us all authority to participate in this course, as teacher or student, is our ability to write.

And then I backpedal.  Our culture has a great many weird ideas of being a “good writer,” and I should say up front that I’m not sure what that term really means, or even if it is useful.  Is a “good” writer someone who produces numerous books? One who writes in a way that makes you cry out of emotion? Or is it someone who writes technical materials perfectly?  Who gets the prize:

Thomas Jefferson

Steven Spielberg

Jonathan Franzen

Wendy Belcher

Louise Erdrich

Hard call.  And were they all always good writers?  Born that way?  A sort of Calvinistic predestination for quality prose? 

So I try to account for all these differences by saying that good writing arises out of practice.  It’s writing that meets its purpose.  Technical, creative, philosophical, reflective, pedagogical writing, whatever kind of writing, is good when it achieves what it came for.

Still, that doesn’t quite satisfy.  It just pushes the question back on “what’s a good purpose”?  And for me, a good purpose is like a good lens: it catches and focuses passion.  This passion may be in the form of an argument (scholarship is like this), an elusive plot or character (fiction), sound-and-image art (poetry), a need to re-see the world (parody and irony).

But here is the trick to it all, for me.  Writing daily and regularly brings forth this passion.  The process of writing turns a heavy inert observation into a question, a problem.  New questions branch off the line of inquiry.  Poet William Stafford said it best for me:

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.

Regular practice gives us time to use writing as a way to find things to say.  I know an artist who says to draw well you have to “put some miles on the pen.”  I know this is contrary to conventional wisdom.  I was always told to figure out what I want to say just write it down.  But based on my experience, I suspect that writers do best when they run out of familiar things to say and talk about, and, while running on fumes, take a leap and try to say something new, even to you, the author.  That is the process William Stafford (above) seems to be talking about: finding a process that takes you places, as opposed to clinging tight to familiar facts or emotions.  If you think you are a particularly generous and kind person, you might find that only when you can write a story with mean-spirited characters do you really start this thing called “good writing.”  You’ll feel it.  It will challenge you.  Arthur Miller put it this way:

The writer must be in it; he can’t be to one side of it, ever.  He has to be endangered by it.  His own attitudes must be tested by it.  The best work that anybody ever writes is the word that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.

So this is what I mean about a level playing field for writers, no matter if they are teachers or students, experienced or novices, fiction or technical writers, introverts or extroverts.  What matters is that we are willing to be “endangered” by what we say and share, that we risk being endangered.  “Good” writers have to reboot daily to find that challenge.  It might mean taking on a new and complex topic, or just practicing using direct language.  It’s easy to write in extremes: desperate, agonized, cute, florid, impassive or gory.  The hard part is being strong and brave enough to develop a practice that will lead you to, not just proceed from, what you passionately need to understand.