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 Writing from the Heart
Something I read the other day made me realize yet again that the important thing in the kind of writing I want to do is "heart". Beauty, of course, and real English, but there is something else that is important to me - and perhaps to you as well?
Thinking about the sense that I often have that my writing is not good, that it falls lamentably short of what I am aiming at, some thoughts come to mind. One is the possibility that I just write rubbish. However, the pieces that usually bothers me most are often those that other people are the most enthusiastic about or touched by so the rubbish theory may not be the whole answer.
Perhaps one reason for this it is that it's kinda hard to see one's own work through tears - the vision is even blurrier than usual. The other is that, in my case at least, I never felt that I could convey the actual experiences - what was inside just wouldn't fit in any words I could find, so they seemed forever inadequate. It's like painting - it can be beautiful or moving or whatever in itself, but getting the soul/heart/gut experience across is something else altogether. I feel a question here for you, dear reader, but am too internally disorganized this morning to manage to ask it. ???
Does good writing hurt sometimes? Does it involve sweating a certain amount of blood? Does a writer need a touch of compulsiveness in order to write well? And perhaps some powerful experience of life, grief and ecstasy both? Does writing sometimes need to be an ecstatic experience?
I come across a lot of stuff on writers's email lists where the author doesn't actually seem to care about writing well at all - poor grammar, terrible spelling (and there is no excuse for that in this day of spell checkers), and a choice of words that makes me think that someone should take away their thesaurus until they learn that "similar" and "related" are not "same". I suppose they are "expressing themselves" - but not very well. There is a certain joy they may be missing in finding exactly the right word... I'm suspicious of "writers" whose eyes don't light up and who don't go rushing to the dictionary at the sight of a new word. But that isn't really the kind of poor writing that I'm thinking about here - that is just technique and anyone can learn it if they want to be bothered to write well.
I've been reading something that is very skillfully written. I kept nodding my head and muttering, "Good one!" Unfortunately, it all seemed to just be fancy technique with nothing to say - no real content, and certainly no heart. There's a great deal of writing like that, and not just on email lists. We see it on bookstore shelves as well. (Small aside: Whatever happened to good editors and proof readers?) Um, I fell asleep last night in the midst of all those clever verbal pyrotechnics, and this morning I can't remember the name of the author or book. Says something, that. I suppose what I would like is to be able to write (or paint or sculpt) in a way that really gets what is soaring inside me out where I can see it from the outside as well as the inside. Maybe next year...
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