Good Writing

There are some things in this world that I absolutely love. Things that will make my heart hum like a tuning fork. One of them is a great choir. How can you not help being caught up in dozens of voices singing different parts of one song? Another of those things is good writing. And I mean GOOD writing. The kind of writing that makes me say, "Man! That is so true! I feel those words, and they were put together exactly right without wasting even one tiny letter." The kind of writing that pleases even the anal-retentive English teacher hidden in my heart.

This anal-retentive English teacher is the reason I have a little compulsion I'd like to admit. Whenever I read a book, sometimes I come across a sentence that is GW (Good Writing). I mark that sentence, either with an indentation of my fingernail or one of these handy Book Darts. After I finish the book, I sit down at my computer and type the sentence into a Quote Library that I keep in an Excel spreadsheet. (The spreadsheet currently has 1,197 quotes in it, but they're not all from books. Some of them are ones I fell in love with through Reader's Digest or elsewhere.) If a book had several pieces of GW, then I open a Word document dedicated to that book, and type up the multiple examples of GW there. (I currently have 102 files like this on my computer.)

I felt compelled to confess my odd little habit after I just finished typing some great quotes from the book Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult. She has a way with words. For example:

"Like always, he made her head swim with seasons – his hair was all the colors of autumn; his eyes the bright blue of a winter sky; his smile as wide as any summer sun."

"She thought of Sam, how she’d left him sleeping this morning in his crib. During the night he’d kicked off a sock; his toes were plump as early peas; it was all she could do not to taste his caramel skin. So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was sustenance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream."

"Alex thought of all the parties she’d ever gone to where the first question she was asked was What do you do? as if that were enough to define you. Nobody ever asked you who you really were, because that changed. You might be a judge or a mother or a dreamer. You might be a loner or a visionary or a pessimist. You might be the victim, and you might be the bully. You could be the parent, and also the child. You might wound one day and heal the next. I’m not perfect, Alex thought, and maybe that was the first step toward becoming that way."

"Everyone would remember Peter [a high school shooter] for nineteen minutes of his life, but what about the other nine million? Lacy [his mother] would have to be the keeper of those, because it was the only way for that part of Peter to stay alive. For every recollection of him that involved a bullet or a scream, she would have a hundred others: of a little boy splashing in a pond, or riding a bicycle for the first time, or waving from the top of a jungle gym. Of a kiss good night, or a crayoned Mother’s Day card, or a voice off-key in the shower. She would string them together – the moments when her child had been just like other people’s. She would wear them, precious pearls, every day of her life; because if she lost them, then the boy she had loved and raised and known would really be gone."

Wow. Sometimes I tell myself that the reason I keep these samples of GW is in the hope that one day I might be a writer, and can use them to help school myself on what GW should look like. Maybe I'll re-read these quotes to help my creativity flow and crash through some yet unknown writer's block. Or, maybe I'm just kidding myself and the truth is I really do have OCD. I guess it could be both!