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What Makes a Good…?

I have been sat for the last few days in various team-building classes designed to make me and my colleagues better techies.  And while all have been fun, and some have been very productive, I have kinda left them feeling a tad ambivalent.  A good techie, we have been told, is patient, communicates calmly and clearly, is organised, is understanding, always says ‘yes’ and never ‘no’, seeks to find the best way to achieve a thing, and, when it can’t be achieved, to find a suitable alternative that will be acceptable to all parties, listens to their team, apologises for their mistakes, is always prepared, is always thinking of others, is always working to suitable deadlines is always…

… and so on and so forth until very promptly you have achieved a state of enlightenment that, I can’t help feel, you might just take some of the joy out of the business.  No one said the Buddha had fun on the way to paradise… but all these things are excellent aspirations, and things to try and work towards as the situation calls for, but life is, alas, far too complicated to apply good generalities easily to bad situations.

All of which leads to a more relevant question…

… what makes a good writer?

Answer is; buggered if anyone knows.  Everyone, as with everything in life, has a different answer.  My publisher would, without a doubt, inform you with a face only slightly twitching with a wry smile, that the ability to take editorial criticism is vital.  My agent would say that being over 45 is preferable, although experience is the key.  Some might say experience of the world; some might say experience of the soul, which is itself a very difficult and delicate subject to pick up on.  Is that man whose father died suddenly more experienced, is their soul cut deeper, are their eyes opened wider, than that woman whose mother passed away after a long battle?  Is that girl whose boyfriend dumped her somehow wiser than that boy whose best mate turned out to have been lying behind his back all that time?  Exactly how we define ‘experience’ in terms of how it shapes people, and therefore writers, is a thorny one.  Which may be why my agent hits ’45 years old’ as a general definition and hopes it goes well from there…

My Dad used to inform me with a stern expression that writers were supposed to have suffered in order to be any good.  This statement usually was followed by ‘so take the rubbish out or else’.  My Mum would add to that discipline and craft, a grasp of the English language and ability to shape a decent story from it.  Again, a thorny area – the excellent English of Jane Austen bears about as much resemblance to the excellent English of Raymond Chandler as a cup of tea to a kangaroo steak.   At primary school we were told ‘you must never start a sentence with ‘but’ or ‘and” (two of my favourite sentence-starters…) and a story must always have a beginning at the beginning, a middle in the middle, and an end at the end.  Rules like these, you might say, are meant to be broken…

A comic writer should be witty; a large number famously suffer from clinical depression.  Romantics should have passionate and wild relationships, see deep into the state of the human heart and know how best to wring its mysteries; crime writers should perceive the darkness in human souls; fantasy writers value sweeping imaginations and brilliant visions of things impossible.  Academic writers should be both factually on the ball and, preferably, not require three stabs at every sentence before it makes sense to read. Perhaps a good writer is defined by his sales figures?  Deeply questionable.  Is Dan Brown a superior writer to Iain M. Banks?  Kinda doubt it; yet Dan Brown has the queues of people stretching round the block at 2 a.m. to get his latest.  (Dan Brown is, incidentally, one of a proud number of writers who, in response to being told by their primary school teachers not to start a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’ went down the smart route of beginning sentences with ‘suddenly’.  A habit my Mum would call bad English and my editor would call excellent narrative pace.  And they’re probably both right…)

Then the problem becomes even more personal.  Is Thomas Hardy a good writer?  (I personally loathe him; yet I know at least one person who in every other way is one of the coolest people I’ve ever met who swears he’s brilliant.)  Is Asterix of the same cultural value as the works of Ernest Hemmingway?  Or to put it another way – when the ice age comes and we’re locked up in the British Library about to freeze to death, do we burn George Orwell or Charles Dickens first?  (I know who I would vote for, but in order to prevent angry letters, I’ll just say (two-facedly) that it’d be a tragedy whichever way….)

Then there’s dudes like Shakespeare.  I personally think the guy rocks, but will freely admit that he has off-days.  (Although to say Shakespeare has an off-day is kinda like saying that the Creator could have tried a touch harder with Wales.)  But there’s plenty of people who can’t stand the guy, and throughout large swathes of the 1800s, the fashion was to nab the particularly nasty bits of Shakespeare (which are, lets face it, generally the best bits) and give them happy ending.  Hamlet gets to turn round in Act 5 and go ‘yo, Claudius!  You were like a total asshole, yeah, but now you and me, we’re blood, man!’  Macbeth gets to the murder of Duncan and goes ‘whoops the dagger was a fake well thank Christ for that, lucky escape all round really.’  In a hundred years time will there be a movement to take the collective adventures of Harry Potter and re-write them to suit a secondary comprehensive theme, and thus make it relevant to the kidz?  Not about to make any predictions on that particular future…

On the very few occasions I get asked what makes a good writer, I usually give the same two answers; imagination and empathy.  Technically speaking, they’re only one answer, since imagination is not just about being able to picture the end of the world and why it might happen, it’s the imagination to think your way into the head of a stranger and understand why they’re pissed off here, now.  But I like to throw in the empathy thing anyway, because I kinda figure it’s a nice human characteristic to have generally.  I’m tempted to throw it into the great ‘what makes a good techie’ debate too, since there are no easy rules on working as a team, or communicating with other people, since ‘yo dude how’s it hanging’ may be the only way to open a conversation with one stressed person, while it’ll result in summary sacking by another.  Empathy, and a willingness to see that sometimes the world is just a little bit more complicated than the rules on the page…