Recently, someone made the comment that writing is easy and proceeded to give me a list of topics and methods of comparing various items and areas in our lives. Voila! Instant paragraphs. On to Mozart. Here is a Piano Concerto in my head whispering life and the way of it. Putting aside the fact that Mozart could write a great symphony on demand over the course of a few days, which only a genius could do, his music props up my own notion that we must somehow use whatever talent we have, to reflect whatever wisdom we have. To step back from the quick and easy sentence, to filter our mass of experience and arrive at the just-so essence. Mozart did that. His music expressed inner meaning common to all of us. Single melodic phrases follow experience and lead us to mutual insight. No small feat and certainly no easy one, not even for Mozart. We need to craft our paragraphs like that, at the phrase level, to file away the apparent and glean the subtle. And that is not easy writing. But it’s good writing.
Must we always write this way, this serious way? Not at all, no more than we need to watch dramatic movies over entertaining fluff every time we pay our way into the theater. But when I leave the lobby with Arnold Scharztznegger in my head, the phrase “good drama” never crosses my mind. To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under the sun. Writing can be fun and writing can also be soul-searching. But it should never be easy. Many would disagree. On my side of the issue are the exhortations of the pros stressing re-writng, stressing being a key word there. Difficult stuff, rewarding, tedious, and necessary.
Another element of good writing, as important as the mechanics of getting it to say what we want rather bowing to our notion of the reader’s expectations, is the soul of all this. Passion. Fill-your-paper-with-the-breathings-of-your-heart-Wordsworth passion. We can write for kicks, write for comics, write for newsletters. But, at some point, we’ll want to move the reader, guide him toward that centerpoint of understanding that inched into our epiphenal nerve center. We’ll want to turn on the sun, show everyman that at least some of his life makes sense in the grinding-self-to-dust day-night of it all. To show him there is no day-night, only life-living, no small matter in those down moments when we feel, and let our minds think, that the Great Punisher sits gloating at the controls, sending us reeling from one mud puddle to the next glass-encrusted paver. We all need this understanding to experience life above living. And writing can accomplish this. But it’s not easy.
