I came across an old journal of mine today. (No, I don’t keep journals any more. I blog, to your eternal annoyance.) It moved me to tears. Not because the writing was so good, but because it was so earnest. It was me, writing my heart out about my innermost feelings and deepest thoughts.
They might seem like typical teenage troubles, and they were. But the sincerity and the vulnerability were what moved me, the cynical grown-up person who thinks she can take on the world.
In the end, that’s what matters about great writing — that it comes from the heart. That it has a modicum of sincerity and genuineness, an innocence of sorts sometimes. A good book draws a reader into itself with this quality. I guess even a truly cynical book would work, if it were sincere enough in its cynicism.
This applies to fiction too, of course. Would you read something the author didn't believe in when they wrote it? I think not.That’s why Lord of The Rings works. That’s why Eragon works, even though it draws so heavily from LoTR that you wonder if there’s any point in counting points of similarity.
That is what any writer wants to do — to engage a reader so completely that they forget about the world they’re in, even if it’s for a second; to get their point across. To tell their story.
On a lighter note, I'm happy to report in my capacity as Grammar Nazi, that I crossed my ‘t’s and dotted my ‘i’s in that journal. I guess I was a bit of a stickler even as a quasi-rebellious teenager.
Well, that girl grew up. Has she changed for the better? Has she overcome her issues, at least some of them? How is she doing now?
Why, I'm doing very well, thank you.
(Yay! Crossed the one-week milestone well and good! That was something.)
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