Your writing “voice” is beautiful, Peter. Achieving that kind of distinctive voice is something I aspire to in my writing. (I don’t aspire to be a writer; I am a writer.) Your distinctive voice comes out of your unique history, and it is pure and lovely; but that alone does not make a great writer. A good editor can adjust spelling and punctuation without detracting from the author’s voice, so that’s not a significant problem, but there is a discipline required, also. And a meaningful, essential structure arises from application of that learned discipline. That is what I seek and what I was talking about in my essay. There is no shame in questioning great writing, for the sin resides in not questioning what it is that we love and why we love it—why it works. I parse it to learn what makes it great. Therefore, my questioning doesn’t belittle the work, it praises it.

Perhaps great writers are both born and made, in concert. Certainly, great writing cannot manifest without a great deal of reading first. It is in our assimilation of what we read that we begin to write better, and from that wellspring my essay flowed—and purely so.

Good writers don’t recite lessons they’ve learned. They hunt for answers. They chase their illusive unknowns, and the appeal is in the thrill of the chase. Make the reader a member of the hunting party. The sweat of active participation—how that rivulet feels running down your back, the musty smell of the horse’s hair matted underneath you, the foam from your steed’s mouth flying in the wind—all these details come from the writer’s experience and make the story real through their affect on your characters. Knowledge is the backdrop, the foundation, the supporting structure, and even the sensibility for what comes next. It is the probing-stick that we use to explore the unknown. But too often it also becomes the crutch we depend on. We think the details are the story, so we stop there, and that kills the story.”

I don’t think I have ever known an aspiring writer to begin with a criticism of good writers. I think it’s virtually impossible to qualify or quantify under any circumstances or discription, regardless of how lengthy, and verbiage apportioned, and gifted said critic might be, to justify such an inflated, and without qualification, overblown analysis of a “good writer”.

A good writer Mr. Garland, doesn’t have to say they are. Thier words speak for themselves. A writer, good or bad, writes with a passion and an internal voice, akin to the voice of God. It’s devine, singular, a separate and shared space. It’s not what they know, but it’s the knowing and the sounds they hear, the voices that talk,the spaces between time, and reality. It’s love, making it, foreplay, climax, and afterglow. It’s the taste of sweat, semen, orchids at a funeral, and lillies at a wedding, the babtismal child inviolate, the cacaphony of a NY city street, or the silence of a sequesterd rural cemetary. It’s the voice, Mr. Garland. Its the magic when you read a phrase, a sentence so good, your mouth waters, and begs to be spoken aloud, and remembered and caressed in the mind and the heart of the reader. It’s the chapter that takes you somewhere, you have never been, but by closing your eyes, you can touch it, taste it, feel it’s pulse, and surrender yourself completely to that moment. Analyzing good writing is like digging a grave, once you have done it, better just pile the dirt back in, because the real story will be on the headstone, and that’s just the beginning.

Drew Olewnick
Chief Marketing Officer
Jill Tucker Nursing Services
http://jilltuckernursing.com/