I remember while working at Nuestro Magazine in New York City that there was a young man who periodically submitted some very witty and well contructed articles for publication. It was a joy editing his work and it was not uncommon for someone on staff to invariably say, "this kid can well". He was younger than most of us and while the people on that staff went on to prominence in journalism and in other fields, not much has been heard from that young man since those years.
My point here is that being able to handle words and to write sentences that serenade our ears and eyes does not make one a great writer. Writing isn't about putting words together or even about sounding good. Ernest Hemingway is famous now but early on few praised him for his wordsmith abilities. His style became one to emulate and critics would come to praise it but that only happened after he became famous. What made Hemingway, and others like him, good was that he could tell a story. His were vivid, they drew you in and they left a tale imprinted in your mind. And ironically his words or flowery phrases never got in the way of the story.
I can remember as a young man how moved I was when I read Rudy Anaya's Tortuga, admittedly not one of his most popular but surely one of his most unforgettable. And, of course, his Bless Me Ultima, now a movie, will remain a classic in New Mexican and Chicano literature. All of us can point to works that have touched us: War and Peace, Gone With the Wind, Al Filo del Agua, Les Miserables, To Kill a Mockingbird, Los de Abajo, etc.
With some writers you can remember a sentence here, a flowery phrase there, but with great writers and scholars you remember the story. You might find quotable parts or you may not but what you will find is a story that resonates deep within you. Scholars can also write good stories even if their's are within case studies, philosophical musings, or sociological studies. Case in point: An American Dilemma: The Negro and Modern Democracy, Companero Che, Mormonism in Transition, etc.
In my time, I have known many a good young wordsmith who never became a good writer. After all, many can learn to put nice sentences and phrases together with much practice. Just read the memoirs and short story collections that are out there by the hundreds. Many are superbly written, yet, few of them will ever be memorable or have much of an impact on those who read them. Good writing unlike good wordsmithing comes from having something important to say, and by finding the feelings, passions and experiences that allow us to frame them in a way that touches people. And this applies to tragedy, comedy, romance, history, sociology, etc.
If you notice most of today's memoirs are rather short, they tend to be a collection of nonconcurrent chapters, and they don't tell a complete story. Usually they are emotional roller coasters. Each is carefully constructed and probably took draft upon draft to finally get it right. They are often witty or extremely emotional. But the real story within them rarely moves flawlessly from chapter to chapter. Instead, they are a collection of parts meant to be put into a whole by the readers themselves.
That kind of writing has its value and can at times be enjoyable to read, but it is also often the kind of writing that struggles to go beyond the witty and the emotional. It is difficult to write longer works with that style of writing because it is "short" on ideas and too dependent on the "I" whether written in first person or not. Self-consumption from which most of these works suffer does not allow the writer to delve deep enough for a truly significant story.
So what does this have to do with anything? Probably nothing, unless you find yourself with a good command of words and even ideas but find your work resonating little outside of your family members and your research assistant. Or if you are a non-academic writer and the only feedback you are getting comes from fellow writers. That happens to all of us ocassionally but if its happening all the time, it might be time to think about why and about how to change that.
There are times when what we write is way ahead of its time, or simply too good for the ordinary reader, but those cases are extremely rare. If you write something good someone will see it and they are likely to get others to read it, especially with today's social media. Now, despite what Tom Hanks says in the De Vinci Code movie, there are academicians who do sell more than 12 books. In the academy the new book sales--with some exceptions--will rarely go into the thousands, but the resales, the library purchases and hand me downs can expose a scholar's work to thousands of individuals. And while they don't bring much money to our pockets, they are responsible for rank advancement, tenure, conference invitations, awards and the occasional radio, newspaper and television interview. In other words, there is mileage to be gotten from a well-written and more important a work that has essence and tells a good story.
So why do some great wordsmiths never become great or even good writers. I think it's because they are caught up in the world of their own words. Here the construction of the message becomes more important than the message itself. These writers lack the patience and may I say the virtue to look deeper within themselves and the people around them. They fail as most of us do to connect their feelings with the cord that bind us all as brothers and sisters or interconnected beings that we are. Their story doesn't say anything about our own experiences. They seem to entertain, inform, or momentarily inspire us but their substance soon fades, and we are left no different than when we began reading.
To me, then, telling the story is the most important component of writing, even in academic work. All significant works have a story to tell. They may be traditional narratives, avant- garde pieces, they may start in the middle and go back and then forward, or they may start at the end and go full circle, they may be literary or scholarly but they all tell a story. It may sound simplistic but find a good work that doesn't have a story even if one has to search for it and you will find a poor work. History comes from "his-story" but we could easily have termed it "her-story", or even "their-story", and still further--for geologists, environmentalists, biologists, economists, etc--its-story".
So a suggestion for my friends the wordsmiths: instead of spending one more hour fighting over each word on the page or screen, expend more energy ensuring that your story is not lost in a web of phrases, sentences and paragraphs. After all, words are not stories and wordsmiths are not always storytellers.
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