Writing well has many faces – 10/18/2023 – Sérgio Rodrigues

The repercussion of the last column, about what I called the “good fight” between two Brazilian writers, left me with the impression that our understanding of the art of writing is suffering from some misunderstandings.

On social media, most comments on the subject were divided into Fla-Flu. Yes, this is the fate of all discussions on the networks, nothing new so far.

It turns out that this Fla-Flu, by separating the teams by style — something like Concisos FC against AA Palavrosos —, does not seem capable of taking the debate to the most advanced stage of the championship.

At least in theory, when it comes to literature, it is just as possible to write well with measured, crystal clear words, as it is with cloudy waterfalls that carry the reader along.

It is never too much to remember that conciseness and clarity have and will always have, in journalism and other informative genres, the value of pure gold in our bachelor’s and pernostic country.

However, art made with words is like all art: any rule you try to impose on it beforehand runs the risk of being demoralized by the work. The best literature creates as it is written the laws by which it will demand to be read.

It is during reading that a literary text —dry or spilled— will show whether it works beautifully, whether it is worth the expense or, which is quite common, whether it just sits there, dead, the words rotting.

In this sense, I defend, against some theorists and their repeaters, that “writing well” does exist, although it has nothing to do with belletrism nor can it be prescribed as a formula.

The idea that writing well is writing according to an ideologically imposed style or taste does not stand up to the examination of history: these aspects have been undermined for at least a century by people who write very well by writing “badly”.

Writing well takes root first on the page, in the vaporous tapestry of sounds and meanings, rhythms and silences, commas and paragraphs, woven by words in a caravan.

With all its imperfections, the written word is the best technology for translating thought, whereby it does what the notation on the score does for music.

Writing well is making the most of your ability to tune in to the brain — and therefore the imagination — of those who read.

This is, after all, the person who will judge, sovereignly, whether a text is well written or not: the reader — to do justice to the genre that concentrates most of those who take literature seriously in the world.

As readers are multiple and diverse, it is natural that multiple and diverse frequencies are at which the texts are in tune with their brain waves.

That’s why it doesn’t make sense, outside the scope of personal taste, to discuss style, but it makes sense to discuss technique: many things can interfere with this harmony.

“A writer is a person who, more than anyone else, has difficulty writing,” said Thomas Mann. What may seem like just a funny joke turns out, when you think about it, to be a profound truth.

As they need to take into account the aesthetic dimension of language to create that which has no existence outside of it, writers invent problems for themselves.

They become neurotic hunters of clichés, undesirable echoes, frills, banality, imprecision, redundancy, sentimentality.

Everything that words, social creatures, mundane and round, have in abundance, but in common language no one cares much about.

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