Good Writing

Writing is hard but rewarding.

Writing is hard but rewarding.

Its hardness is well expressed in the joke: “Writing isn’t hard. Just sit there trying to think of something. . . until blood comes out of your forehead.” Or “I could easily be a writer, but I don’t like the paperwork.” There’s certainly a lot of paperwork—which, to speak seriously, is the learnable craft in writing. I treat it in a little book called Economical Writing: Thirty-Five Rules for Clear and Persuasive Prose, revealing the tricks about good word-work. For example, “Express parallel ideas in parallel form.” Or, just sit there trying to think of something—but notice that if you put down one thought, it turns out that the sentence you wrote itself suggests the next thought. Then do it again, and again. You’ll get a draft.

The hard craft comes in revision and revision and revision, using the dozens of learnable tricks. Hemingway sneered at Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, in which Kerouac followed the sentence-sentence-sentence plan but did not revise at all. “That’s not writing,” Hemingway said. “It’s typing.” Hemingway also said that he revised the final paragraph of Farewell to Arms fifty times. I myself revise obsessively, day after day, in good moods and bad, until it stops feeling improved. We’re blessed nowadays with word processing, which makes revision much easier than Hemingway’s paper and pencil. “Easy writing,” he also said, “makes hard reading.”

The reward is the same as making any beautiful thing, a lovely meal for Christmas dinner, or a song-lyric in the style of Rubel Brisolla, or a satisfying 5k run in Parque Villa-Lobos, or a sweet goal against Palmeiras.

Beauty rules writing the way it rules science and religion. The beauty comes from a difficult thing done well. If it’s too easy, it’s just typing. If it’s too hard, the blood comes out of your forehead. The great Hungarian-American psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934-2021; we just called him “Mike”) devised a word for such success, the real happiness in a human life—“flow.” It’s not the easy pleasure of eating a candy bar. It’s doing something just at the limit of your competence. Beautifully. You are, we say, “absorbed” in the task. Time stops. You forget lunch. The result is “Nossos bosques têm mais vida, / Nossa vida mais amores.”

I suppose we could now give up writing entirely and depend on artificial intelligence to produce novels, song lyrics, scientific treatises, and letters to Mother. AI is certainly useful. I use it to check my Brazilian facts. Though watch out: it sometimes makes up facts. A little like humans.

But notice that we in English and Portuguese use the same word, “good,” to describe a beautiful line in poetry and also a good deed in politics. That is, aesthetics is also about ethics, at any rate when humans, not nature, is being judged. Beautiful scenes in nature, such as the Iguazu Falls, have no ethical content. They are sublime but not good behavior.

And that’s one reason that writing needs humans. We humans judge. As a great English poet said, “truth is beauty.”

Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.