What Makes Writing Good?

When it comes to what makes writing good, I think I agree with Vonnegut

Sylvia Plath said she wrote because there’s a voice inside her that won’t be still.

I can relate to that. I think a lot of writers do.

I love the snippets that fell from the minds of writers who came before us. Their thoughts and words a golden thread weaving gently through time and space to stitch us together. To form the fabric of storytelling and I marvel that so many of us who are drawn to words feel the same emotions and think the same thoughts.

Kafka saying a non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity and the days when work deadlines are looming and the lawn needs mowing and the garden needs weeding and there’s no time to write and everything makes me cry—I hear him.

So I set my alarm a bit earlier because it’s easier to make time than find it.

Sometimes you can pluck their thoughts from books. A Moveable Feast, Hemingway pacing back and forth, sitting to stare into the fire as he tossed in bits of orange peel and told himself you have always written before and you will write again.

Often, we can find their thoughts in letters. Glorious old letters written to friends and loved ones in an era where communication was paper not email or text. Thoughts scrawled in black ink or pecked out on an old beast with a carriage return instead of enter key, and no key for the numeral one because a lower case L sufficed.

Kerouac writing to Ginsberg, saying he just wants to read and he wants to write and the world can go to hell because he doesn’t believe in society, but he believes in man. And I read that and somehow I feel a little less alone in this crazy world.

Letters from Vonnegut and Kerouac, Steinbeck and Plath. Sylvia’s letters to her mother the summer of her bee poems. The letters even more telling in her case because the man who broke her heart didn’t edit her letters after she died, only her poetry.

All those words weaving through time, whispering look—we are all the same, we who are called by words. Look! Look how our hearts beat to the same drummer.

Of course, the thing about famous writers is that they were famous. Their work was so good it was loved by many. That’s how we know their names. Even if we didn’t wake up to their work until they were long gone. Lady Lazarus rising from the grave.

But it begs the question — what makes writing good?

Ay — there’s the rub, as Shakespeare wrote.

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Our minds are funny things. Some random thing happens and suddenly we’re riding a thought train going a hundred miles an hour with no idea where it’s taking us.

Let me share a strange journey.

The last three posts I published on Medium were declined for boost. Then within 48 hours, I got an email that said your post has 100 clappers.

Declined for boost. And then — Your post has 100 clappers.

That happened three times in a row.

What strange language, isn’t it? 100 clappers. Why not 100 people clapped for your story? It’s right up there with calling us “users” which some platforms do. I’m not a user or a clapper. I am a living, breathing human being who loves to read and if I like a story or it makes me think or feel, I clap. Or heart, depending where I’m reading.

This isn’t about Medium, so you understand.

It’s that every time we write something, there’s that hope.

Please let someone love this. Please let it resonate.

At Medium, you hope to get a post boosted as some confirmation that it’s good writing. But really? A boost is one person’s opinion. Two, actually. The boost nominator thought it was good enough to submit. The curator disagreed.

They can both be wrong.

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If you know Kurt Vonnegut, it might be from Slaughterhouse-Five or Cat's Cradle, or maybe Breakfast of Champions. Maybe you know his name but not his work.

In his eight rules for writing fiction, the first rule is this…

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted. —Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuffbox

I don’t think it’s just fiction.

I do think he nailed what makes writing good. When the reader gets to the end and feels like they got something. Because sometimes, a reader gets to the end and thinks wow, that’s five minutes of my life I’m not getting back. That’s not good writing.

Sometimes I see people discussing what makes writing good. Some people say you have to teach something. Which isn’t true, because if it was there wouldn’t be literature, art, and poetry at the top of the leaderboards. But there is.

I read a post by some editor saying our personal experiences aren’t supposed to be stories, they’re only supposed be anecdotes in an essay. And yet one of my most read stories of all time is a very personal experience. But people resonated with the feeling.

Sometimes, you bleed a piece of your heart in words and think no one liked it, but three months later some magic button gets pushed somewhere in the universe and readers start showing up and that story you thought was a dud grows wings.

One of the wisest things an editor ever said to me is that she doesn’t need to like the topic to recognize compelling writing. And I think the best thing a writer can strive for is to use the reader’s time well. What anyone but the reader thinks doesn’t matter.

Love to know what you think.

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?