Since I've had my website online many people have said to me that they write but that their writing isn't anything like as good as mine. I must say that always makes me feel slightly uncomfortable mainly because I have never really seen that my writing is all that great. For the last few days I've been considering what it might mean to be a good writer.
Until I thought about this my view had always been that you just recognise good writing. I guess I'm quite a snob when it comes to other people's work. I often read other people's writings and cringe at how awful it is. However I also accept that I'm not really that good at reading other people's work. At university I was never very good at English Literature I could just never really get to grips with what the hell was going on.
I remember reading a thing that Steven Fry wrote about Douglas Adams shortly after he died saying that Adams' writing always made you feel like he had written that piece especially for you. That others wouldn't quite get it the way that you were getting it at that moment. I think that is what writing is about if you can write something that somebody else can read and relate to then you have written something good. If you can write something that can have an impact on somebody else's thought processes if you can alter their course in some way then you have a responsibility to write what you write.
There are six billion people on this planet if you can write something that can have an impact on just one of those people then you have written something that is worthwhile. It doesn't matter if the rest of the population thinks it is tripe!
Perhaps we are all born into the old mindset of publishing houses having to be the conduit that all poetry is published through. Unless a work fitted within the classical framework of 'good' poetry, story, or whatever it had very little chance of ever finding a market. With the advent of the internet we have all been given the power to become our very own publishing house and hence able to find an audience that has an appreciation for whatever style of work is written. If it is something that you can write, there is somebody out there that can take something from it.
The human race has a great legacy of storytelling it is part of our nature to pass on our stories to others. If we are lucky our stories will survive long after we are ash. At around the 7 BC Homer wrote an epic poem named The Iliad for nearly three thousand years this story has been passed on. For hundreds of years the poems of Shakespeare and Keats have been revered as the pinnacle of human creation. They have captured the stories of these people and passed them down through the centuries. There will be poets and story tellers from this era whose stories will be remembered through time. Perhaps it will be founded from the things you are writing today. Perhaps your work will become the modern equivalent of Keats. Perhaps somebody will read what you write and be inspired to become today's great poet. The one inescapable fact in all of this though is that your experiences and your life have given you a unique perspective of the world that nobody has ever witnessed before. Your viewpoint has never been expressed previously and will never be seen again. In this world of such easy publishing it would be a terrible waste not to put that viewpoint into the public domain let others see the world that you see. Let others reap the seeds that you sow for none of us know what it might become.
