Being a Good Writer

Being a good writer means capturing your reader's attention and evoking an emotional response. I read a book about four teenage girls, written from watching their chat room messages. The vocabulary was complex if you account for how many times I had to look something up, the grammar was subpar, and... what punctuation? But it was creative, it grabbed my attention, and I found myself caring about what happened to these girls as they traverse their relationship with the world and each other. Someone else, many someone else's, picked up the same book and were immediately turned off by the writing style, I found this book in a pile of books that had been banned by schools. Which considering the material it covered, shining a light on peer pressure around sex and a teacher starting an inappropriate relationship with one of the girls, made me think it was written precisely for a school-aged audience. I felt those girl's happiness and fear as their stories progressed, the writer had my attention and made me feel something.

This was my first experience with a non-traditionally written book, and it changed my definition of good writing. It was highly creative but would fail to meet the other stipulations you put as 'good' writing. One book is not going to capture everyone's attention, the book I described you may pick up, flip it open, and put it right back on the shelf, because it didn't speak to you. Being a good writer should not be about trying to write something that speaks to everyone or most people, it should be about speaking to at least one other person and making that person feel something. As long as building authentic connection is the goal, I don't think we will ever turn into mindless unsophisticated zombies.