The following is an excerpt from Roger Rosenblatt’s “Unless it Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing,” which has been published by HarperCollins on January 11th.
In “Unless It Moves the Human Heart,” he tracks the progress of a graduate writing course he taught at Stony Brook University in the spring semester of 2008. The course, called “Writing Everything,” had students write short stories, poems, and essays so that they might stretch a bit and concentrate on the strengths of each of the different forms. The following passage represents something that didn’t fit into any of the classes but seemed worth saying.TO: My ungrateful students
RE: An inspirational letter
Oh, read it anyway. You may not need this postscript as much as I need to give it to you. But there is something about writing I haven’t told you, in part because it smacks of the sentimental and abstract—two of the monsters I’ve hoped to drive from your work. And yet, if I fail to give you this final piece of information, if I let you stride toward that desk of yours thinking that good writing consists only of precision and restraint, and of the right words in the right order, and using anticipation over surprise, and imagination over invention and the preference of the noun to the adjective and the verb to the adverb, and a dozen other little lessons, however helpful they may be, you may conclude that once you’ve nailed these ideas, well, you’re a writer. Well, you’re not. Not yet.
stories are everywhere 