How to Write Great

Roger Rosenblatt has some thoughts in the New York Times.

From the piece...

Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening. Look at a point of land over which the sun is certain to rise, Coleridge said. If the moon rises there, so what? The senses are startled, that’s all. But if we know the point where the sun will rise as it has always risen and as it will rise tomorrow and the next day too, well, well! At the beginning of “Hamlet” there can be no doubt that by the play’s end, the prince will buy it. Between start and finish, then, we may concentrate on what he says and who he is, matters made more intense by our knowing he is doomed. In every piece of work, at one juncture or another, a writer has the choice of doing something weird or something true. The lesser writer will haul up the moon. 

There have been times in literary history when writers steered clear of the great moral issues, but not completely, and never for long. The 18th century (Johnson, Gray, Cowper) had no problem telling people how to think and behave. The Romantics made the egotistical sublime, though Wordsworth’s self was large enough for everyone. The Victorians opened things up again, as did T. S. Eliot a little later, with big pronouncements about the state of the world. Literature took to the confessional in the 1960s, when personal demons took over for universal evils. Yet while Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath shrank subject matter to the size of Czar Lepke and Daddy, we still could see the Us in Them. One might say that the shadow of the Big Bad Bomb made honor, heroism and the rest beside the point. But “Invisible Man” and “Doctor Zhivago” appeared while we were ducking and covering, suggesting that dealing with big themes in literature depends less on eras than on individual inclination.