Submission Tip #31: Awareness When I was in graduate school, someone once asked our workshop instructor, Elizabeth Evans, what she believed to be a writer’s most important quality. She mulled over the question for a while before saying, “I think a writer needs to be smart.” At the time I didn’t think much of that answer. Of course a writer needs to be smart! What kind of wisdom is that? So why, if her words were so obvious, have they stayed with me for 25 years, floating around my mind and informing my thoughts and choices and aspirations as much as any teacher’s words ever have? Because I have come to value the many dimensions of her statement, of what it means to be smart as a writer. We might talk about emotion in a personal essay, and we might talk about intelligence, and we might discuss them as if they are separate qualities. We might talk about being clever or funny. But “smart,” for me, overarches and includes all of those qualities and forms an aura of awareness. This writer is aware, you think. This writer is smart. “Smart” is when you believe, as a reader, that you’re in good hands. “Smart” is when you realize the writer is showing you something you didn’t know or didn’t realize you knew. “Smart” is about making connections and conveying understanding that goes beyond mere explanations or “this happened, then that happened” storytelling. “Smart” takes time and demonstrates authority. It probably represents an understanding the writer didn’t have when he or she began writing. It means being humble enough to have faith that the writing process is where you learn rather than where you prove what you already know. Most of the essays I receive are well written on a sentence level. Many tell compelling stories. So what often proves to be the difference between what gets seriously considered and what doesn’t? One writer has made a leap of understanding that another hasn’t. Thomas Hooven, in his marvelous essay from November 13, 2013, brought together his physician’s intelligence, personal heartbreak, and hands-on hospital experience to illustrate how we mature into love and come to know compassion. His essay was smart not because it had big words or clever turns of phrases or because he demonstrated his mastery of medicine. It was smart because he had come to understand something complex about the human heart and was able to convey that understanding to readers through storytelling. Metaphors can fail badly in writing, seeming clunky or obvious or too simplistic, but in the hands of a smart writer, they can instruct better than anything else. Ann Leary’s use of her tennis game with husband Denis Leary (in her 9/26/13 essay) to show how their marriage had shifted from destructive competition to enduring camaraderie was both organic to the story and a perfect illustration of how long-term marriage survives, by playing to each other’s strengths. As I read those passages—feeling skeptical (as I often do) of big metaphors—I quickly surrendered to the authority of the writer, realizing she was teaching me something I didn’t know, or at least not in that way. In my own life, I occasionally find myself thinking about Ann Leary’s tennis game. I think about Thomas Hooven’s revelatory illustration of emotional maturity. That is the gift of such writing. Being smart in those ways is, to me, the most elusive and important quality of personal essay writing. It’s an authority that can’t be faked, and it’s often all that separates a well-written rejected essay from a well-written accepted one.
Posted on: Wed, 22 Jan 2014 18:34:00 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015