The Courage to Write

Four days in, my writing class students have created some terrific stuff. We've buried parents, tasted Christmas eggnog, and taken Pete the dragon along on a family trip to Disneyland. 

Each summer as I teach this three-week, every-weekday session, I give the required reading a fresh look. That means I keep up in Writing the Natural Way, the main text and the one that contains the prompts we use. And I read a chapter a day in Annie Dillard's Waldenesque Pilgrim at Tinker Creek along with Ralph Keyes's The Courage to Write. I came across two quotes today in Keyes that I consider worth passing along:

"The assurance that you have something to say that the world needs to hear counts for more than literary skill." (My variation: 90 percent of writing is having something worth saying.) 

If a reader doesn't "get" what he [the writer] is saying, it's the writer's problem, not the reader's.