A Roar For Powerful Words!

Bev Jackson has awarded me the Shameless Lion Award. This award originated with Seamus Kearney of Shameless Words and the Shameless Lion Writing Circle, who wrote:

“Those people I’ve given this award to are encouraged to post it on their own blogs; list three things they believe are necessary for good, powerful writing; and then pass the award on to the five blogs they want to honour, who in turn pass it on to five others, etc etc. Let’s send a roar through the blogosphere!” (read award details here)

I’m always happy to give a loud roar for good writing, and I agree with Seamus’ three things — innnovation, truth, and humanism — to which I’ll add three more things I think are necessary for good, powerful writing:

1) Love of learning. I’m not talking about the letters after your name. Love of learning (call it natural curiosity if you will) makes the writer a sponge for details from which to draw just the right ones. Love of learning makes us thorough researchers, who sometimes need a 12-step program to get us to stop researching and write. It keeps us open to new ways of telling a story and to experimentation and practice. One never finishes learning.

2) Awareness, including empathy. Awareness of the world around us helps a writer catch those fleeting details that make a story come to life. There’s a whole world inside a story, and the writer’s awareness of her outer world helps her select just the right details to make the world of the story seem real. A great writer also understands people and their feelings, and can stand in another’s shoes and experience their perspective. Of course we never do this perfectly, as each person’s experience is unique; but a powerful writer comes oh so close.

3) Courage. A powerful writer must be willing to take risks, to face conflict head on, to take up subjects others may be afraid to tackle. Sometimes the risk is writing about an issue personal to the writer, a past trauma, or something the people in her life may not be happy that she writes. Sometimes it’s a matter of getting a character to a conflict instead of writing circles around it. Sometimes it’s an artistic risk, writing in a style or form that’s new and untested, or on a topic that’s unpopular or politically charged. To illustrate this, I’ll quote yet another line from a movie, The Thomas Crown Affair (1999). (Warning, if you haven’t seen the movie this setup may be a spoiler.) Detective Michael McCann, played by Denis Leary, presses insurance investigator Catherine Banning (Rene Russo) for information about their art theft suspect, Thomas Crown (Pierce Brosnan), who’s also at this point Catherine’s lover. Catherine hesitates, and the detective says, “You know what? Life is full of shitty conflicts, okay? Give!” That line encapsulates for me the power of conflict and risk-taking in writing. It has to be there for writing to be powerful, and the writer has to face it head-on. Give!

Now for the people I want to award with a Roar. For starters, I wish I could pass this award right back to Bev for her poem, To My Young Husband, 1963.

Here’s my list:

1) Cate at Trailing Light
2) Susan at Spinning
3) Bruce Black at Wordswimmer
4) Eric Mayer at Byzantine Blog
5) Wayne at Nutty Steamers

There, five! I won’t have to cheat, in fact I could’ve gone on. In closing I want to point to Bev’s new art gallery website, Art Shack Studio.