From the obituary of Yehuda Amichai (b. 5/3/24, d. 9/22/00) that was published in the New York Times:

Metaphor “is the great human revolution, at least on a par with the invention of the wheel.”

“There’s an old Jewish saying, ‘If you meet the devil, take him with you into the synagogue.’  Try to take the evil of politics into yourself, to influence it imaginatively, to give it human shape.  This is my attitude toward politics.”

For him, all poetry was political.  “This is because real poems deal with a human response to reality, and politics is part of reality, history in the making.  Even if a poet writes about sitting in a glass house drinking tea, it reflects politics.”

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Marina Tsvetaeva in 1926 in “The Poet on the Critic”:

“Who am I writing for?  Not for the millions, not for one person alive, and not for myself.  I write for the sake of the thing itself.  The thing writes itself through me.”

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Thomas Mann to Erich Kahler, 3/18/31:

“Give the times their due and publish what you have written.  I understand your inhibitions, but we believe until almost at the end that the decisive word remains to be written, and yet we have always set down far more of the decisive words than we ourselves can possibly appreciate.”

*   *   *   *   *

Franz Kafka (as quoted, who knows how reliably, by Gustav Janouch in his Conversations with Kafka):
Wealth is “material insecurity.”

Kafka’s works are, in his own words, “evidence of solitude.”  Hence his sincere desire to destroy them.

On Georg Trakl: ” ‘He had too much imagination,’ said Kafka.  ‘So he could not endure the war [WW I], which arose above all from a monstrous lack of imagination.’ ”

“My complaints about the disorder in the office, and especially around myself, are only a trick, by which I try to hide the insecurity of my existence from the accusing and inquisitive gaze of the outside world.  In reality, I only manage to live because of the disorder, from which I steal the last remnant of personal freedom.”

The Germans “do not wish to comprehend, understand, read.  They only wish to possess and rule; for that, understanding is usually a hindrance.”

” ‘Are they dancers?’ I stupidly inquired, with a glance at a well-disciplined chair of chorus girls.  ‘No, they’re soldiers,’ replied Kafka.  ‘A [musical] revue is a military parade in disguise.’ “

Sandi Wisenberg is the faculty adviser for The OLLI Journal, which is the annual literary magazine of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Northwestern. She wrote this at the request of the new editor. You can find more information about the Journal and read the latest issue at http://www.scs.northwestern.edu/olli/journal. She is the co-director of the MA/MFA in Creative Writing program at NU. Her third book is The Adventures of Cancer Bitch (U of Iowa Press, 2009), nonfiction that Bookslut called “damned funny” and “far more selfless than most illness memoirs.”

What is good writing?

First, a caveat: There are a few works that everyone agrees are good—such as the plays of Shakespeare. But it’s easy to find disagreement about most other literary efforts. For example, the 1980 Atlantic Monthly reviewer of Raymond Carver’s (now classic) story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, wrote: “There is nothing here to appease a reader’s basic literary needs.”

So, what criteria should The Journal editors use? I’ve come up with some attributes of good writing. They’re not exhaustive. And you may disagree with them. I’ve also provided examples and definitions you can find on line. Just click twice on the URLs.

Good writing has fresh language. The words are not trite or cliched. If there’s repetition, it’s deliberate and artful—to make a point, for emphasis, to please the reader’s “ear.” There’s a mix of rhythms in the sentences—OK, except for Hemingway. Great writing also helps you see the world in a new way, by the writer’s perceptions.

Most successful pieces inform the reader how to read the piece. For example, an essay with a light beginning “tells” or signals the reader that the rest of the piece will follow suit. If the tone changes dramatically, the reader will be confused. If a piece begins realistically, the reader will expect the rest of the piece to be realistic (unless the author manages to ease the reader into the unreal).

There are exceptions. There are always exceptions.

PROSE:

1. Realistic stories, memoirs and travel pieces

Novelist John Gardner said that readers “recreate, with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous dream the writer worked out in his mind (revising and revising until he got it right) and captured in language…” Good writing should be smooth and consistent and detailed enough so that the reader isn’t jerked out of her “dream” while reading it. For example, if a writer gets the reader used to reading about people sitting in a kitchen for two pages, and then the writer suddenly shifts the venue without a transition, the reader will probably be jerked out of the “dream.” That said, some writing works by juxtaposition and association, and the reader is expected to pause between segments.

In a realistic short story or memoir, the reader knows where the characters are in time and space, is given enough information so that she can imagine the setting.

Dialogue should sound natural, and the characters should sound at least slightly different from one another. Dialogue should reveal character, move the story forward and show relationships. It shouldn’t be expository. (“Remember the time we went to the beach?” “Oh yes, I remember–we went with my husband Joe and your husband Moe and your three children. It was before Moe left to join the circus.”)

Main characters should be round—as contradictory as the people you know well. Beware of stereotypes, unless you’re writing fables..

Action should emanate from character. Beginning writers often force action or revelation. In a good short story, every action should feel inevitable.

Language should be consistent. If a piece begins conversationally, then it should be conversational all the way through—unless there’s a specific reason for it to change. Again, if the diction changes abruptly for no good reason, the reader will wonder what’s going on.

A classic short story with a very close third-person narrator is Katherine Mansfield’s “Bliss.” You can search for it at http://www.short-stories.co.uk/. Find classic American stories at: www.americanliterature.com/ss/ssindx.html..

Then there’s flash fiction or short-shorts. You can read about them here and scroll down for a list of anthologies: http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/flash.shtml. I’m partial to Crafting the Very Short Story: An Anthology of 100 Masterpieces, edited by Mark Mills, for reasons that will become obvious if you examine the table of contents. Another site: http://www.quickfiction.org/

Memoir usually consists of a story, plus reflection on the meaning of the event, or on the way the writer’s view of the event has changed.

There should be some shift, however subtle, from beginning to end. The shift could be in mood, circumstances, opinion. It could be a shift from isolation to community.

The best travel pieces provide vivid descriptions of people and places, while telling a story of an interior journey or awakening or change of perception. Here’s a fairly short, straight-forward but quirky travel piece: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9901E1D61439F931A25752C1A963958260.

2. Non-realistic prose

In a recent review-essay in the New York Review of Books, novelist Zadie Smith wrote about the tiredness of “lyrical Realism.” Of a new realistic novel she says, “It seems perfectly done—in a sense that’s the problem. It’s so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait.”

<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22083>

As an alternative, Smith writes about metafiction, mentioning Donald Barthelme. (Choose from many of his pieces here: <www.jessamyn.com/barth/>.) There are also fables, fantasy, science fiction, as well as work that’s mythic, surreal, absurd. Here’s Stacey Richter’s recent “The Land of Pain,” which is unrealistic but to my lights, truthful: <www.ewu.edu/willowsprings/archives/richter.pdf>. The problem with some fantasy and science fiction is that the characters and plots are generic. That’s why literary magazine editors sometimes ban them; it’s easier to condemn them all than to go through many bad submissions. But then they might miss a story by someone like Borges: <www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_links.html>

Here’s a short fable by Kafka: http://www.scribd.com/doc/4855051/A-Little-Fable.

3. Essays

Consummate essayist Phillip Lopate says that an essay shows the mind at work. Writers are expected to use exposition in an essay. The best essays are explorations and are not polemical. The essay can digress, as long as the digressions are interesting.

What is interesting? There’s the rub.

Here is an essay by Lopate, which is about what many memoir writers fail to do:

<www.philliplopate.com/reflection.html>. The essay-review is another form of the essay, where the writer explores a topic, using books for fodder. Here’s Lopate again, writing about another great nonfiction writer, Edmund Wilson: http://www.philliplopate.com/wilson.html

Then there’s the lyric essay, a term coined by the editors of The Seneca Review: <http://web.hws.edu/academics/community/senecareview/lyricessay.asp>. And there’s an online magazine that publishes all kinds of nonfictions under 750 words: http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity. You’ll also find reviews, interviews and craft essays on the site.

POETRY

What is poetry? According to about.com, “Poetry is an imaginative awareness of experience expressed through meaning, sound, and rhythmic language choices so as to evoke an emotional response. Poetry has been known to employ meter and rhyme, but this is by no means necessary.”

Poetry is condensed, compressed language. Line breaks should be deliberate and should enhance the poem. Every word needs to be the exact word. As W. H. Auden said, “Poetry is memorable speech.” As Janet Burroway writes in Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft, “Because poetry attempts to produce an emotional response through heightened evocation of the senses, imagery holds a central place among its techniques.” Also, poetry is the natural home for metaphor.

You can find a wealth of poems at www.poets.org, which is sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. You can also search for literary movements from Acmeism to Slam to Victorian.

There is a hybrid, very similar to the lyric essay: the prose poem. Poets.org defines the prose poem thusly: “While it lacks the line breaks associated with poetry, the prose poem maintains a poetic quality, often utilizing techniques common to poetry, such as fragmentation, compression, repetition, and rhyme. The prose poem can range in length from a few lines to several pages long, and it may explore a limitless array of styles and subjects.” Read more about the prose poem here: <http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5787>.

I hope that reading some of these examples will get you thinking about what you can accomplish in your own writing. Remember, too, that most good writing is re-writing. Many writers will tell you that their first drafts are rough, undeveloped and unpublishable.