The Subjectivity of Effective Writing

Good writing, or effective writing (semantics), is often a matter of personal taste on the part of the reader rather than craft on the part of the author.

Sure, one can aim for a general audience and try to reach everyone, but really, there's no accounting for taste, and the writer should not suffer. I wonder how many books sit, unpublished, simply because they don't have an audience. They're wonderfully written and tell a great story, but who the heck wants to read this? Who would buy this? Can we put it on an endcap with Cormac McCarthy and Barbara Kingsolver and Nick Hornby?

Plenty of published authors aren't effective, at least to this blogger. Cormac McCarthy, for example, is not effective to me because he doesn't use quotation marks, and I find the whole concept distracting and pretentious. Ezra Pound, as another example, is not effective unless one is fluent in four languages and gets all the oblique references. I find him inaccessible and purposely complex, as though he is trying to confound any readers who aren't of the same realm of experience. It's offputting.

Both McCarthy and Pound are widely recognized as great writers -- canonized, even. Literature scholars love them because they break rules and epitomize movements and create such memorable images and characters.

But among modernists, why would anyone read Pound when William Carlos Williams is so much more accessible, not so elite?

Let's reconsider effectiveness...

A writer takes an assignment -- write about the first time you fired a gun. The writer punches out a wonderful article about his time spent in Vietnam, fighting the Viet Cong, losing innocence, virginity, his mind, and only marginally discusses firing a gun for the first time -- although he includes it.

Is it possible that the writer's outpouring has transcended the boundaries of the assignment rather than disregarding them?

And is that effective writing, if a reader -- any reader, mind you -- picks up the article and reads it, unaware of the original assignment?

Imagine a great song that started with an idea -- "Let's write a song about the IRS." -- only to result in The Beatles' "Taxman."

Perhaps we've gotten hung up on guidelines and boundaries. Perhaps Pound and McCarthy would argue the same. If we must write, we must write competently, to be sure, but we must also write honestly, refusing to shoehorn ourselves if our chosen form doesn't fit. If a piece of writing wants to be a short story, so be it, regardless of whether the editor or teacher wanted a poem. Screw 'em, and screw their guidelines.

Writing isn't about following a prescription so much as a spontaneous outpouring of art.