Good Writing Involves More Than Putting Words on the Page
The Daily Corinthian   |   February 17, 2008
By Stacy Jones

When others discover that an individual writes, one of the first questions is often, “What do you write?” One of the second is “Where do you get all of your ideas”?

Answering those questions can be easy or difficult, depending on one’s mood at the time. I once met a woman who asked me the first question, and before I could answer, she followed with another question: “Are your stories anything like ‘Little House on the Prairie’?”

She was sincere enough but a bit naïve. I tried to be as kind as possible in my response, but many books have passed over the transom and into the bound volumes of literature since Laura Ingalls Wilder penned her tales of life on the Minnesota prairie in the late 19th century. I also grew up far from the madding Minnesota prairie, to boot.

Yet anyone, from jackleg novice to Nobel Prize winner, who has put writing utensil to paper—or in the more modern world, finger to keyboard—shares commonalities. When I sat down to write this morning, I began just like every other writer: with a blank page. Writing is easy, after all, isn’t it? In the end, it’s just putting words on the page.

The irony is that although writing starts with words, it must, in the end, become more than that. North Carolina writer Thomas Wolfe said as much. “Writing,” he said, “is easy. Just put a sheet of paper in the typewriter and start bleeding.”

Writing is a blood sport in so many different ways.

Blood sports involve animal suffering, for one. Just as women sometimes go to great lengths to obtain what is touted as beauty, writers have to suffer not only for beauty but for truth as well. (We all know the famous line from the Romantic poet John Keats: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”) In other words, for writing to be good, the words have to be beautiful: razor-precise and well cadenced, and the truth—the emotional authenticity—must be present, even if one is writing fiction. It still has to feel real.

Despite those moments of ecstasy that come in the midst of seemingly inspired writing, there are numerous instances that feel something akin to the myth of Sisyphus. After defying the gods by chaining up Death, Sisyphus is doomed to live out the rest of his days rolling a rock up a hill, only to watch it roll back down and repeat the process over and over throughout eternity.

This is writing. In the struggle for both quality and quantity as a writer, it feels as though one will never finish trying to attain some high ideal. Being a perfectionist only complicates matters. I know because I am one, and sometimes the fear of failure is crippling.

Writing is a blood sport, too, because it involves delving deeply into the human psyche. Maybe newspaper columns generally do not delve so deeply, but the canon of belles lettres is filled with works that do. And the human psyche can be a dark, mucky, unflinchingly brutal place. That’s because being human, which means knowing immense beauty and joy at times, is accompanied by alternating cycles of staggering grief and loss. Thankfully, for most of us, we experience more beauty and joys than we do the rest. But in order to have one, we must have the other—like the Taoist yin and yang.

Accordingly, I am always mistrustful of writing that is too saccharin. In a conversation I had with writer Frederick Busch about a manuscript, he gave a wonderful piece of advice. He said you’ve got to peer over into the canyon of sentimentality but avoid taking the leap. It’s a long way down and very hard at the bottom.

One of my favorite books is by renegade writer Charles Bukowski, who avoids the sentimental. It would be highly unlikely to see a Bukowski book made into a movie and aired on the Lifetime or Oxygen channel. In this particular book, the main character, said to be Bukowski’s own alter ego, is a degenerate writer. Not much evolves in the character study of Hank Chinaski, the protagonist, but his voice is so compelling. And human. You root for him to succeed, even though he spends most of the book not doing so.

Not long ago, I went online to see what others thought about the book. One pedestrian reviewer who did not like it wrote, “Try reading ‘Tuesdays with Morrie,’ a short, transparently clear book that celebrates what is best in human nature rather than what is worst.” Nothing against Mitch Albom, author of the bestseller “Tuesdays With Morrie,” but I’ll take a hard-hitting Bukowsi book any day over Albom.

So why write, if doing it well is so hard and involves delving into dark places? Writer Albert Camus said, “If the world were clear, art would not exist.” Writing is also connective in a world where it can be too easy to feel alone. I find useful Stephen King’s analogy of writing and telepathy in his well-crafted book “On Writing.” King describes the craft of writing as a sort of telepathic medium, a way of communicating that transcends the boundaries of space and time.

That’s exactly what writing does. I sit writing at the desk in my home office in Memphis on a Friday morning. Sometime on Sunday, readers pick up the newspaper, most of them in the Corinth area, and see what I have to say. We communicate in almost telepathic fashion. And that once-intimidating blank page that I started with this morning has now been filled, hopefully with something meaningful.

(Stacy Jones, a Southerner, is a Master of Fine Arts student in fiction writing at The University of Memphis. She is a native of Guys, Tenn., and her columns, which appear on Sundays, are archived at Southern-Drawl.com.)