About Writing

A good writer can get you to read almost anything and a great writer can get you to read about things you'd prefer not to think about. Have you ever had the experience of someone telling you something they found hilariously funny—they can barely get through the telling, it's so funny—but you were not at all moved? When that kind of thing is done in print, it's what I call, "I-feel" writing. A writer is in haste to tell the reader, "hey, I felt a lot, right here," and instead of using words, craft, the subject and elbow grease to make the case and woo me inside the story too, to actually make me "feel" the same thing, the writer takes the short cut, tells me how she feels, ergo how I should feel.

Now I can think one of two things: either, I'm not feeling enough, or, more likely, the writer is feeling a bit too much. Someone calls it, "smelling the writer". It's a good exercise for every author to work his way through a manuscript and pick out each place where he is telling the reader, point blank, "I felt. . .", remove it entirely, then work the text to actually make the reader wrap her own five senses around it without having to be hit over the head. This is no small exercise; it could take an additional year or two of research and writing.

Most of us are not natural story-tellers. We're probably more natural feelers and we might talk about feeling more than an earlier generation. It's not enough to stand at the headwaters of a book and say, "I feel; therefore I am." A writer must convince the reader on every page at a gut level of the need to care about this topic—that of all the things vying to soak up every drop of a reader's attention and compassion, this one should matter.