After filling myself with that unique blend of inspiration and wonder that comes from attending a fabulous writers’ group, I had a tiny, effortless moment of insight.
I was thinking about writing. About my own writing, and what exactly I aspire to. I imagined for a moment that someone else was describing my writing, and the words that I would like to hear them using to describe the essential qualities common across my body of work.
As soon as I’d framed the question, the answers came – each one arising with clarity and colour in my mind:
Strange
Beautiful
Truth
Strange – because strangeness stretches us, grows us and gives us new understanding. In essence, strangeness is at the very heart of originality. It’s the new, slightly askew view, the novel approach, the uniqueness of a thing.
Beautiful – I aspire for my work to be lyrical, to capture the fragile moments of ordinary and awful beauty that wash over us and around us, often unnoticed.
Truth – I aspire for my work to contain at least a fragment of truth – the truth of our shared humanity. While truth is a many-splendoured thing, and its name has been put to the service of terrible crimes, there is another type of truth: the unadorned place of connection, the sacred space from which the power of sharing our stories arises. We do something profound when we acknowledge the reality of another person’s lived journey. We can do this when we gift our readers with a piece of ourselves, so that they can enjoy the jolt of recognition in an otherwise imagined/imaginal/fictional reality.
That’s a big ask, right?
Yes, and no. I’m going to write what I’m going to write. It will be what it is. Along the path to publication the writing will be held up to objective standards, those elements of the craft that are determined by either consensus or debate to be what is required for “good” writing, for publication, or even for commercial success. None of that, however, creates any personal impetus or satisfaction: that, my friends, must come from within.
Once you have overcome the peculiar notion that even a single person on the planet might want to read what you have written, everything else about the quest for recognition and readership becomes even more absurd. No two people will ever share the same opinion of your work, because each reader brings a part of themselves to the story that they are reading. Essentially, you are pitching your work to an endlessly shifting finish line.
So what, then, can a writer aspire to? Fortune? Not often. Fame? Not likely. Popularity? Oddly mediated, and even more fickle than ever in the age of the one minute meme.
The only thing left to aim for is to write something good. And the only definition of “good” that will be even remotely useful to the writer is the one they have crafted for themselves.
Strange beautiful truth, it is, then.
I was thinking about writing. About my own writing, and what exactly I aspire to. I imagined for a moment that someone else was describing my writing, and the words that I would like to hear them using to describe the essential qualities common across my body of work.
As soon as I’d framed the question, the answers came – each one arising with clarity and colour in my mind:
Strange
Beautiful
Truth
Strange – because strangeness stretches us, grows us and gives us new understanding. In essence, strangeness is at the very heart of originality. It’s the new, slightly askew view, the novel approach, the uniqueness of a thing.
Beautiful – I aspire for my work to be lyrical, to capture the fragile moments of ordinary and awful beauty that wash over us and around us, often unnoticed.
Truth – I aspire for my work to contain at least a fragment of truth – the truth of our shared humanity. While truth is a many-splendoured thing, and its name has been put to the service of terrible crimes, there is another type of truth: the unadorned place of connection, the sacred space from which the power of sharing our stories arises. We do something profound when we acknowledge the reality of another person’s lived journey. We can do this when we gift our readers with a piece of ourselves, so that they can enjoy the jolt of recognition in an otherwise imagined/imaginal/fictional reality.
That’s a big ask, right?
Yes, and no. I’m going to write what I’m going to write. It will be what it is. Along the path to publication the writing will be held up to objective standards, those elements of the craft that are determined by either consensus or debate to be what is required for “good” writing, for publication, or even for commercial success. None of that, however, creates any personal impetus or satisfaction: that, my friends, must come from within.
Once you have overcome the peculiar notion that even a single person on the planet might want to read what you have written, everything else about the quest for recognition and readership becomes even more absurd. No two people will ever share the same opinion of your work, because each reader brings a part of themselves to the story that they are reading. Essentially, you are pitching your work to an endlessly shifting finish line.
So what, then, can a writer aspire to? Fortune? Not often. Fame? Not likely. Popularity? Oddly mediated, and even more fickle than ever in the age of the one minute meme.
The only thing left to aim for is to write something good. And the only definition of “good” that will be even remotely useful to the writer is the one they have crafted for themselves.
Strange beautiful truth, it is, then.
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