Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style

Any artist of any kind has to be able to stomach falling short of the mark, continually, in all kinds of ways. But perhaps especially when starting out.

Character and action impinge upon one another, in life as in fiction. A person’s inherent character shapes his or her choices. The opposite is also true: character rises out of choice and action. Interaction between a given personality and a situation of conflict that arises, provoking choice and action—consequently revealing, changing, or deepenin

Writing is hard work. Writing well is very hard work. It takes courage and perseverance.

You take an issue about which you feel urgency, mix it with your experience, add the imaginative “what if,” and whammy, you’ve got ammunition for a book.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

esoteric

Fetishism of famous writers, he suggested, occurs because “it’s such heavy-lifting to actually read books.”

The point is, writing well, even an ordinary letter or a well-considered e-mail, demands the generosity of your time, effort, and thought. You have to care enough that it’s worth your energy, weighing that cost against the cost of not doing it.

Writing is a generosity, even to yourself.