what's good writing?

Good writing, I contend, is not stylistic. Truly good writing employs substance over style. A proficiency in language alone does not a good writer make. It is a concinnity of intellect and emotion that animate the inanimate. Words are merely academic without the ideas that inform them and emotions that choreograph their literary dance. There is always the idea behind the idiom.

This poem by Polish Nobel laureate, Wisława Szymborska, is a case in point. It was written in Polish, but none of the elegance of its idea is lost in translation. Ideas transcend language. They speak the universal tongue that is the human experience.

The Joy Of Writing

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence - this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what's here isn't life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

- Wisława Szymborska