Writing the Way You Speak, page 5

What is Writing About?, continued

So what are these deeper qualities that mark good writing? I nominate these for the time being. Good writing has:

• Structure

• Narrative

• Clarity

• Ideas

Structure refers to the underlying way in which something is organized. Narrative means the story that is being told.

Clarity means presenting something so that it is clear and easily understood. To present something with clarity, you must understand it with clarity. Understanding something with clarity requires careful and close onbservation. For more about writing with clarity, see Chapter 2, "Explaining Difficult Things."

There are many different kinds of ideas. Ultimately, I believe that the most important role of writing is to validate and explain ideas, and to convince others of their validity.

In something that is well written, you can find structure and narrative both at the close-up level (in each paragraph), and also when viewed from far away (an entire book). You’ll also find ideas presented with clarity both in the microcosm and in the macrocosm.

Make sure to check out the "Stretch Your Brain" excercise related to this.

Don’t get all hot and bothered under your collar if you can find a counter example or two or three. Not all good writing has to have structure and narrative. There probably exists some good writing that doesn’t present ideas with clarity. But don’t kid yourself: just because a narrative seems inchoate at first blush, it doesn’t mean it really is. Here’s a sentence that comes from William Faulkner’s great novel “The Sound and the Fury”:

In the midst of the voices and the hands Ben sat, rapt in his sweet blue gaze. Dilsey sat bolt upright beside, crying rigidly and quietly in the annealment and the blood of the remembered Lamb.

Don’t be too quick to assume that this apparently nonsensical sentence doesn’t make sense in context. (But what does it mean to sit in the “midst of ... hands”?)

Apparent confusion, and the writer drunk on words, can mask complete control on part of an author. An author should not be confused with characters invented by the author. For that matter, the ideas presented in an essay may not be the true view of the author.

Continued next page

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