1: What Makes Writing Great?
In this first episode, we begin with a deceptively simple question: what is great writing?
If you’re like me, great writing is something you recognize on an intuitive level, but when you try to articulate what makes that writing great, things get . . . complicated.
Here, I offer a way of thinking about great writing that cuts across genre and style—a simple framework, both descriptive and prescriptive, for naming what sits at the heart of every truly great work of literature.
I actually wrote the first draft of this episode back in early July while I was on my annual solo writing retreat. I was reading Thomas Merton and felt really connected with God for the first time in a while, and then inspiration for this first episode hit. What came out surprised me. In the months since, the ideas have continued to guide and anchor my work with clients. I trust they will prove equally helpful for you.
Listen below (or on your favorite podcast app. The full text of the episode is also included below for your reading pleasure.
Episode text:
We’ll be talking about plenty of practical tools and techniques in future episodes. But first it’s important to get clear about what we mean when we say great writing.
Whether you’re here to appreciate it more deeply or to learn how to produce it yourself, we need a shared sense of what “it” is. Put another way, before we set off on this adventure through the wilds of the written word, we should clarify where we’re trying to go.
If you’re like me, great writing is something you recognize on an intuitive level—something you feel in your bones.
But when we try to articulate what makes that writing great—to name the characteristics that set it apart, things get… complicated.
Sure, I could give you a list of technical qualities that I look for when I’m editing, but that would quickly bring up questions of genre and style. What I’m after here is something more universal.
We might be tempted to jump to popularity or critical acclaim as markers of great writing, but while quantitative indicators like 5-star ratings received, units sold, or even awards won can—and often do—correlate with quality, we’ve all had the experience of opening a widely celebrated book and finding ourselves slogging through word soup.
So how CAN we distinguish great writing from mediocre? Or is it purely subjective?
Preferences vary widely, but if you’re listening, I suspect that—like me—you believe that there are some qualities that transcend personal taste that allow us to say, with some confidence, this is better: this is great writing.
Of course, there are dozens—probably hundreds—of elements at work in any great piece of writing that we can isolate, analyze, and imitate. But in my experience, whenever writing truly feels great, two qualities are always present.
In this episode, I want to offer a way of thinking about great writing that cuts across genre and style—a simple framework, both descriptive and prescriptive, for what sits at the heart of every truly great work of literature.
Let’s begin.
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More than anything else, it’s language that makes us unique as a species—particularly written language, and what it allows us to do.
According to Judeo-Christian scriptures, God spoke the world into existence. “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”
Whether or not you believe that, I think we can all sense that words have power—power to create and to destroy.
The stories we believe, that we tell ourselves about our lives, become our reality. Through narrative, we create meaning, weaving facts into true fictions. And this is happening every hour, every second, without our being aware of it. We are meaning-making machines, and words are what carry that meaning into the world.
Words also connect us to one another, creating bonds based on shared narratives. What else is a relationship but the sense that your stories are intertwined?
The written word is particularly unique. Many intelligent animal species communicate, but humans are the only ones that write. Writing allows us to turn the transience of speech into something immortal, something that transcends time and, in recent centuries, space—crossing any distance, bringing two people, writer and reader, face-to-face.
Writing is, at its core, communication, a reaching out across the gulf between two souls. It’s the author saying, “Here I am. This is my experience. This is the meaning I’ve made out of the mess and madness of life. Maybe it will help you.”
At the deepest level, writing says, “You are not alone. There is hope.”
The act of writing is inherently hopeful. It presumes someone will be there to read it. That there is something worth recording. That someone might find it meaningful. Even journaling privately implies a hope that the act of writing is itself transformative.
And it is. Research shows that writing expressively (about your thoughts and feelings) just 20 minutes a day for 4 days in a row led to a 50% improvement in immune response and a measurable improvement in mood.1
Writing also helps us to make sense of our life experiences, to find out what we think, as Stephen King says, and to form coherent narratives that allow us to heal from trauma. Even if if no one else ever reads it, writing is an incredibly powerful practice.
But most writing is, I believe, intended to be shared. It’s a form of communication.
And while all writing is inherently valuable, some writing is undoubtedly more effective than others.
So, what makes writing great?
At the micro level, it depends on so many things: purpose, audience, genre, and so on.
But after 17 years of teaching writing and editing professionally, plus almost 40 of reading avidly, I think great writing, across genre and style, is characterized by two things.
1. Great writing is TRUE.
I don’t mean factual. I mean that it attempts to say something deeply honest, to communicate a truth discovered or at least confirmed through experience and tested by time. In this sense, great writing is always a self-revelation, even when the subject is not the self.
2. Great writing is TRANSFORMATIVE.
It seeks to portray and initiate (or encourage) transformation.
Transformation is at the heart of every story—the main character grows (or sometimes devolves, in a cautionary tale) in some way as a result of the events in the story. Prescriptive books (personal development, self-help, etc) are overtly aimed at transformation for the reader. But even with something like poetry, which might be neither a story n or a prescription but “merely” description, when it is done well, it will leave the reader a little bit different than she was before.
And writing—done well—is always transformative for the writer. I tell my clients, if you’re not at least a little different after you finish an essay or an article or a book than you were when you started, you’re doing it wrong.
Writing something deeply true changes you. And reading it changes the reader.
This is, perhaps, getting at the heart of why any of us writes or reads.
We want to understand the world a little more clearly, to see it more truly. And we want to be changed by that seeing—to feel, think, or even behave differently as a result.
And literature, in the broadest sense, is a powerful path to both—understanding and change, truth and transformation.
What about beauty? You might be asking. What about meaning? Simple enjoyment? Aren’t those reasons we write and read too?
Of course they are. But beauty and meaning are not the starting point of great writing—they are the result. They emerge when a writer is committed to truth and willing to follow it wherever it leads, and when that truth carries the potential for transformation.
And what about the pleasure of reading something engaging, absorbing, even delightful? Yes, the simple enjoyment that can come with reading certain great texts shouldn’t be dismissed.
But such enjoyment alone gives us entertainment—not literature. Great writing is not just entertaining–it is engaging. It may delight us, transport us, or indulge our imagination. But without truth and transformation at the core of the project, it will never be more than good.
Great writing, on the other hand, is always guided by those deeper, less ephemeral aims. It seeks not (or not only) to please, but to reveal; not only to delight, but to change. Entertainment comes as a side-effect.
Keep in mind here that reader transformation can often be enhanced by entertaining style or content. So in the pursuit of transformation, you might share a hilarious story or weave in some cringe-worthy puns or spend weeks improving the tension and pacing in your novel. But it’s always in service of the deeper goal.
Of course, most readers won’t notice any of this, at least not consciously. Great writing, like any great art, is something we recognize on an intuitive level. We know it when we see it, but when asked what’s so great about it, most of us find it very hard to put into words.
And that’s ok.
As Billy Collins’ wonderful poem titled “Introduction to Poetry” reminds us, analysis is, in many ways, the best way to kill a work of art—rather, to destroy our opportunity to experience it fully and authentically, which is the point.
Despite what all those English classes might have led you to believe, the point of literature is not to eviscerate each text and study its innards under a microscope. The point is to soak in the experience each offers, to immerse yourself in the author’s perspective, to soar on the wings of an eagle or sink under the weight of the American Dream (as with Tennyson’s “The Eagle” and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, respectively). Momentarily, of course, and then rise to the surface of our own lives again with renewed appreciation or resolve.
Nevertheless, analysis does offer its own treasures. It can teach us to read more closely, and it can help us learn to produce great writing of our own, just as a painter must study various techniques but ultimately moves beyond them, incorporating them into the instinctive craftsmanship that characterizes a master.
Ultimately, great writing transcends craft. It’s more than the sum of its parts, more than an amalgamation of techniques. We all know the disappointment of, for example, listening to a technically perfect rendition of a favorite musical piece that lacks that “something,” that human-ness that makes it come alive. It has no soul, and so it can never be truly great. AI only makes this more obvious.
Greatness, the way we’re defining it here, is not about perfection. In fact, “imperfections”—intentional and in service of the truth—are part of what makes great writing great. They’re what give it soul.
But we mustn’t equate soul with imperfection. Rather, it goes back to that higher principle of truth, which is inherently spiritual. It’s a connection with the divine, with capital T truth, a glimpse through the veil that limits our perspective in this fallen world, a flash of something brighter, clearer, deeper, truer. We experience it, as readers, as being taken momentarily beyond ourselves, let (or sometimes pushed) beyond what we’d formerly considered the limit of our reality—an encounter with the Great Beyond.
This might sound dramatic. Sometimes it feels dramatic. Other times it’s much more subtle. But the difference in intensity is not to be confused with a difference in substance. The same spirit that animates a life-changing book infuses the single sentence that captures your attention and glitters there in your memory long after reading it.
We can no more force this aspect of greatness into our writing than we can capture the wind. But we can invite it. We can open ourselves to it, prepare the soil for its arrival, nurture the seed when it begins to sprout.
Just as the intelligent farmer uses the advantages of science to create ideal growing conditions but cannot create the spark of life that transforms a seed into a fruiting tree, so too must we learn and apply the science of great writing while still making room for the ineffable, animating spirit to infuse our words with life. To give them a soul, not just a body.
And in so doing, we expose our own souls to profound transformation.
Great writing always requires vulnerability on the part of the writer. It is the prerequisite for truth. The writer must be willing to split herself open, to expose herself, yes, to public scrutiny, but more profoundly to that purifying fire of Truth that makes the threat of public disapproval seem trivial in comparison.
To paraphrase Annie Dillard’s metaphor in Chapter 7 of The Writing Life, the writer must with her pen prick the pulsing flesh of her heart until the blood runs and then follow it wherever it leads.2 Or, to use a Jungian analogy, the writer must descend deep into the subterranean caves of her own psyche to face, and ultimately befriend, the monster that she there discovers. One who has done that no longer fears the opinions of others. They may still sting, of course, but they do not pierce past the skin.
This is not to say that all great writing is explicitly autobiographical. Great writing exists and is possible in every genre, from memoir to fantasy to self-help. Rather, the kind of self-exposure I’m describing is part of the creative process no matter the genre. If great writing results, the writer has gone through that experience of “laying bare.”
For this reason, the pursuit of producing truly great writing is not for the faint of heart. It requires courage. And it requires commitment. It is not the goal of an hour, or week, or even year. It is the dream of a lifetime.
It does not come cheap, though it can in some ways at some moments come easy. It requires nothing less than the full surrender of what Thomas Merton calls your “false self”—that mask we all wear in a misguided attempt at self-protection.3 Writing, of the sort we’re discussing, is one of the surest ways to melt away that façade and reveal the true self beneath.
By seeking truth, great writing leads us to transformation, revealing new layers of beauty and meaning, bringing our souls more into alignment with the Great Author of Creation. It weaves an infinite web of inter-connection: writer to reader, reader to reader, both to the ultimate Source of Truth—transcending time and space to form an unbreakable bond.
It is a noble calling, but the daily practice is rarely glamorous. More often, it’s tedious, painstaking, confounding, humbling. Perhaps that’s always the case for any endeavor that enables us to glimpse the divine—it takes hard work to bend our stubborn, earthly forms into a receptive posture.
But writing is not all drudgery. Sometimes we fall into flow, hours slipping away like minutes. Or we see the quality of our prose improving and swell with the quiet satisfaction of growth.
And then there are those rare moments of magic that make it all worth it: the thrill of recognition when something truly transformative emerges on the page, surprising us with a brilliance we scarcely dared hope for.
If you’ve been writing—or creating in any medium—for any significant length of time, you’ve surely seen it: The turn of phrase that says more than you had intended. The pattern of light and color that evokes an association you hadn’t considered. The seemingly random word choice that turns an object into a symbol and cracks open deeper layers of meaning. Each is a moment of alchemy, transmission, transcendence, when something greater takes over and all you can do is allow it—and give thanks.
Great writing, then is the result of something ineffable—something that cannot be forced or manufactured. And yet, we are responsible for the conditions that make room for that transcendent truth and that carry it intact from one person to another.
So how do we do that? How do we cultivate the conditions for greatness without smothering the creative spark? Or, for many of us, already bowed under the weight of productivity culture’s fear-based motivation, how do we practice discipline while also reclaiming space for inspiration?
That question—how creativity and craft, mystery and discipline, come together to produce life-changing writing—is what this podcast is all about.
I’m so glad you’re joining me for the journey.
While this first episode leaned philosophical, rest assured—you’ll find plenty of practical tools, techniques, and strategies in future episodes. But I felt it was important to begin this project, this podcast, with a shared understanding of what we mean by great writing.
For much of my teaching career, I focused primarily on the science of writing—how to be more concise, clear, compelling, and correct. But ultimately, none of that matters if you’re not saying something meaningful, something true, something transformative.
Earlier in my life, I swung hard in the opposite direction, and I treated rules and formulas as enemies of true creativity. Over time, though, I’ve come to see that craft and creativity are not adversaries at all. They work in tandem, in a kind of symbiosis.
And I’ve come to see that such balance, such interplay is at the heart of all great writing.
Ultimately, great writing requires both soul—intuition, vulnerability, transcendence—and science—analysis, structure, technique.
The next two episodes will dive deeper into each of these components in turn, exploring how each is essential and yet, on its own, insufficient, for creating writing that resonates, transforms, and endures.
I hope you’ll join me!
I’d love to hear from you!
Did this episode stir something in you? What qualities comes to mind for you when you think of great writing?
And if you really loved it, please consider sharing this post/episode with a writer friend.
Footnotes:
1 Many studies confirm similar results, but here’s one you can reference on writing’s impact on anxiety, and here’s an interview with a pioneer of some of that research.
2 The Writing Life by Annie Dillard (paraphrase from Chapter 7)
3 Thomas Merton’s discussion of “the false self” in Chapter 2 of New Seeds of Contemplation
