Random musing in the car on the way home from work

[mousme]

I was listening to Simon & Garfunkel on the way home in the car, and automatically turned it to my (currently) favourite song: "Hazy Shade of Winter."

This, believe it or not, coupled with my ongoing love affair with Concrete Blonde these past weeks, brought my ever-fertile little mind around to what good writing really is. No, no, I swear my mind comes up with these things by itself!

Anyway, it put me in mind of one of my favourite quotes by Alexander Pope:

"Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd."

Good writing is precisely that.

See, I was toying with the idea that good writing meant the imaginative use of words to evoke an emotional or intellectual response, but that's not quite it, is it? Good writing has always "spoken" to me (no pun intended), in a visceral sense as well as an intellectual sense.

What constitutes good writing, for me, then, is when it makes me cry out "Yes! That's exactly how I would have put it if I had had the presence of mind to do so!" The best part is when an author can make me see something I've already seen described dozens of times and in dozens of apt ways in an entirely new light which still makes me have that reaction.

It's the element of familiarity in the midst of surprise that does it for me, I think. The idea that I can recognise something described with words I've never seen put together before in that particular order.

That's why reading authors like Lovecraft just make me want to lie down and roll around in their words like a dog in the grass. :)

Sorry if you were expecting a well-thought-out essay, this is just me rambling while trying to follow an online game at the same time. Deuced tricky, that is. ;)

Comments

I sort of lean towards clarity...

[fearsclave.livejournal.com]

...good legal writing is clear, even if the law isn't. You read it, and the reasoning all falls together, step by step.

Of course, that's not the same kind of writing you're talking about, so I'll shut up now.

Re: I sort of lean towards clarity...

[mousme.livejournal.com]

*grin*

Actually, you're not far off the mark. If the writing is incomprehensible, then there's not much point.

Clarity, of course, is far more subjective in fiction than in law, however. ;)

[wolfsden.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this. I thoroughly enjoyed it, haven't read a book in weeks, and feel compelled to now.

Thank you for putting it so precisely!

[mina-laury.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, I know those moments!

When I was younger I really hated being told 'write about what you know'. The whole point of writing was to get away from what I knew; writing about school would only mire me deeper in the endemic anger I felt at the place, and writing about home would either be dishonest or hurt my parents' and brothers' feelings.

So I wrote about places I'd never been like South Africa and New York, but eventually I came back to the problem that it's hard to get that 'Yes, that's how it is!' response when writing about something you've never seen. If you grew up five hundred miles from the sea you'd never think to call it wine-dark, you'd just fall back on greens and blues.

So these days I work on 'Write about what you know, whether that's because you've lived it, or because it only exists in your head'. :)