Good Writing

The mistake of strong writing is this: it is good. Too good. Constantly good. The mistake of good writing is that it causes you to ask questions, thousands of questions, without trusting any answers. In other words, the problem with good writing is that it is constantly causing a writer to doubt. The problem with good writing is that it is revised over and over and over again until the heart has been removed. Or maybe not the heart, but without a doubt any of the flaws, leaving the reader in awe of the person who can “just write.” And if you can just write, and have no mistakes then you teach me nothing about life because in life I make a million mistakes every day and people have to sort through all the typos and through all of the contradictions in a person’s live to see his or her heart. You see, I just contradicted myself. Good writing, strong logic, doesn't do that, but I just did. I did, and probably before I’m done pushing buttons on my computer I will do it again. It’s not unlikely. That’s another thing life is that good writing is not: repetitive. Most humans are not Anne Shirley, I cannot tell you the number of times that I have made the same mistake, faced the same dilemmas, heard the same words from friends. Life is full of repetition, but good writing eliminates repeated words (unless we repeat the words on purpose, like a prayer said every morning). Or, good writing is often free of parentheticals and yet life seems to be full of them: life and time itself is a parenthetical sitting in the middle of eternity. Eternity, that is another reason why life doesn't quite fit under the mold of good writing. Life, even in time, sits inside of something eternal: good writing begins clearly and ends clearly. A good chapter has a good beginning and yet we rarely seem to look big enough to see the book of time in eternity, and look at the continuity between the creation of the world and the re-creation.

Re-creation, writing is re-creation, perhaps that is why even when you write drafts over and over to show a broken world, it still romanticizes it: because writing is a recreation. If I really wanted you to understand why I am writing I will go back and revise it, at least once, rewording a sentence so that it will stick in your head like a photograph of a sunrise. Which is another reminder of beginning and endings: did you ever notice how we do have book markers to the day but we never stop to see them, or mark them or we rarely stop to see both of them, and so we complain that the days go on and on in a single stream with the same repeats without seeing the repetitions that were meant to be there, meant to be said again.

Writing is re-writing: trying again, and yet when you write in life the first mistake you made will not disappear. But at the same time: grace is revision. No matter how many times you write it, grace will come back to it, and give the words another chance to say it another way as it brushes through the words just the way they are.