Friday, June 24, 2011

Damn Good Writing

A writer writes good words. Some authors, even successful ones, can't do that, but they have An Idea that trumps their lack of facility with words.

A good writer has both ideas and words.

A Damn Good Writer writes with the passion of someone who's just been fired and is pouring out their rage onto an email that, hopefully, will never be sent. Or a lover who is alight with the glory of that first love-making. Or a parent whose child has died. Or a child who didn't get what they wanted for christmas.

Raw emotion. Blazing, searing, terrifying, elating: the feelings that pull us out of ourselves, out of thought and reason.

A Damn Good Writer not only can write those emotions, they can then take them and craft them to distill the essence of those emotions into clear, accessible prose.

And when A Damn Good Writer does this, the words burn on the page.

We cannot all be writers. Even fewer can be good writers. But to be a Damn Good Writer - that is the hope and the despair of longing.

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