Good Writing

Good writers are like hen’s teeth. It’s relatively easy to report or relay information on a subject the writer has a background in. It’s much harder to take any subject matter and serve it up in a way that is both entertaining and informative. Good writing, unlike grammar, punctuation and spelling cannot be taught. Sure, creative writing courses are filled to the gunnels with wannabe wordsmiths convinced they’ll be the next J.K Rowling or Phillip Pullman. I should know I’ve attended the good, the bad and the downright appalling. Good writing should appear effortless to the reader when in reality the author has spent hours ruthlessly editing and tinkering with his or her work to make it the best it can be. It should be concise, immediate and pull the reader in.

I also believe good writing should take risks. The English language is constantly evolving and growing as more words in common usage make their way into the OED. Writers are no longer constrained by traditional sentence structure or punctuation and the best of new writing illustrates this. Poets are literary ‘test pilots’ who are constantly pushing the envelope by challenging the status quo.  Great poets lead us through an unfamiliar, almost alien landscape where we don’t have a clue what’s around the next stanza. They are in effect striving to produce ‘The Lorenzo’s Oil’ of Literature. This is distilled into being by a fair amount of nail-hitting, atom-splitting and advanced rabbit-out-of-the-hat-ology. It usually begins with a rendering of pain, joy or poignancy by trimming off fatty irrelevance and scratching out insipid detail.

At some point that will-o-the-wisp ‘The Muse’ usually helps out, but this relies on the conscious and subconscious getting along and we writers know they have a reputation for caprice and ephemerally bad behaviour. Finally, and most importantly you need to imagine your poem trying to describe to some heartless alien how your first kiss felt, not forgetting to be beautifully vague and leave curious voids on the page.

It can also be difficult to pace one’s writing correctly. Cadence and rhythm are vital in carrying a story forward. If a writer runs hell for leather through the first few paragraphs it soon collapses in a wheezing heap after only a few pages. Conversely, if they choose to wade through treacle with long leaden sentences then readers tend to extricate themselves before the end of the first chapter. It’s all about balance. Readers relish the quiet calm interludes just as much as the frenetic action scenes. The best books make us walk, jog and race along with them giving our minds a comprehensive workout as we travel towards the last page.

Finally, and in my mind most importantly, all good short stories and novels need big believable characters in order to exist and to thrive. I operate on the principle of character first, story second. Victoria Wood once said “Great characters can be lifted and placed  in any situation without any loss of impact or plot deterioration” I know she was referring to situation comedy, but the rules still apply to both short and longer works of fiction. If you can nail a character in the first page then the reader will want to stay with them till the last sentence. You only need to look at the works of Dickens to appreciate the sheer beauty of perfectly crafted characters that burn brightly in our memory long after the story has faded away