Measuring the Worth of My Words

 

Do I write because I’m a good writer, or am I a good writer because I write? Am I even a good writer?  Am I a writer at all?

Writing, to me, is like fine art.  The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  I like it or I don’t.  I “get” it or I don’t.  Matters of technical execution on a piece of art are important only to those who make a career out of judging such things.  Technique is a collection of motor and contextual skills, put together to create a work of art.  And art is to be enjoyed, even by those of us who wouldn’t know an Impressionist from a cartoonist.

For me, the answer to just about all the questions posed above is: Who cares?  But that’s just me.

People write for so many different reasons.  Some are enamored of books with pages to flip and margins to write in and they imagine their own names on the cover of one.  Others have received positive feedback on their efforts for so long, they see writing as a possible way to make a living.  And others have a lot on their minds, things they want to say and they choose writing as the way to communicate. Of course, there are people motivated by some combination of them all.

So how do we know if what we write is good?  The easiest assessment, or at least the base line for all assessment, is the mechanical:  things such as spelling, grammar, use of literary tools like alliteration, onomatopoeia and repetition of words or phrases. Anyone who aspires to be considered a writer in the eyes of others is going to need to deal with the mechanics of writing.

And isn’t that exactly what we mean when we question our own abilities?  How others receive what we write will be the accelerator for our trip to what we consider to be success.

I am always amused by the discussions I observe about the quality of writing.  There is little agreement, if any at all.  What seems to be the common criterion about what makes high quality is one’s own writing.

For example, I am a fan of writing for understanding.  I prefer simple sentences with accessible vocabulary.  I’m not the biggest fan of adverbs and adjectives, although I am capable of employing them when required.  For me, lots of what my parents called 50-cent words strung end to end are not necessary when fewer 25-cent words accomplish the same meaning.  Whether or not my preference for writing that way is based on my preference to read others who write that way is not clear.  It’s possible.

Does that mean I cannot appreciate the work of writers who can wrap a sentence filled with descriptive prose around column inch after column inch?  On the contrary.  I am a fan of William Faulkner.  Enough said? 

But when I read writers like that, my reason for reading is completely different.  Instead of being satisfied with getting the message the writer is imparting, now I have the added challenge of simply navigating the prose in order to unravel that message.  It is a distinctly different process with distinctly different motivation on my part.

When I first started blogging, my only objective was to get some of the clutter out of my brain and onto something hard, as in paper or drive. Having no one at home with whom to converse about all these things, writing it down does the trick.  The only person I knew for certain was reading what I wrote was the person who persuaded me to start blogging.  So my writing was purely a heart and mind dump, meant mostly for myself.

But when I began to write on a writer’s web site, where competition for recognition was added to the mix, I  was temporarily derailed by what just happens to be two of my most prominent personal values:  Achievement and recognition.  These were formally determined by a series of personality tests I’ve taken in my lifetime.  Suddenly, I was writing, not for me, but for the editors who had the controls over which posts were selected for recognition.

In order to satisfy only two of my personal values, I found myself searching for things to write about that had a better chance of being selected.  Why? To gain the approval of a single individual who is marching to a set of drums that have nothing to do with my own cadence?

I have come back to home base.  I don’t want to whine about the relative quality of writing or the topics people choose to explore.  There is really only one set of eyes  I need approval from:  my own.  My currency, my payoff for any effort I put in at the keyboard, is in the form of reader’s comments.  I live for the “conversations” that take place in the comment strings.  I learn from the points of view offered in response to my own. 

It is nice – very nice—to be told I am a good writer.  The thing is, when I ask myself what that really means, I get no answer.