The question of how to write well is, I think, both a mystery and a conundrum in this sense: you know when the writing is bad and why, but it’s harder to tell why writing is good, elegant, meaningful. Having read, literally, thousands of writers from all over the globe and from every period of human history, I have come to the conclusion that good writing has nothing to with using complicated words or impenetrable syntax, nothing to do with subtle arguments or complex rhetorical strategies, nothing to do with tricky poetic tropes, unusual metaphors, or innovative symbols although these are often attributes given to good writing and are often found in good writing. Good writing has to do, more likely, with what is in the writer’s heart. Passion seems to be a hallmark of good writing, but it’s not just passion either because some passionate writing in awful, overridden by tired cliches and worn out tropes. I like clarity, but I have read many things that were utterly clear and despised them. The art of writing has to be a combination of passion and clarity, incisive commentary and enlightened observation, entangled within an engaging combination words, phrases, and clauses that invite the reader to continue reading. Boring writing is dead writing, even when the writing is clear and meaningful. There is a “matter-of-factness” about good writing which draws in the reader so they want to find out what might be next. Predictable writing is also dead writing, so writing that will bring something new to the rhetorical table is welcome and fresh. Perhaps there is also an element of truth that must ring out in good writing because the reader cannot for a second suspect the writer of shoveling so much syntactic and semantic manure or the cause is lost. Writing that goes unread is not writing at all, dead, sepulchral, frozen, unmovable. I also suspect that writing which is too concrete is tedious, boring, and dreadful. Ambiguity, well done, can raise good writing to a higher state of sublime creation where allegory, fable, metaphor, and symbol dwell in rhetorical paradise, meaning, signifying, but untethered to a literal meaning or interpretation. I also suspect that good writing is tied to an unfettered imagination, explosive creativity, and unbridled originality. So if we tie a true passionate heart to an inventive creative mind that will not be bounded by mundane or ordinary, dreary or humdrum, prose, then good writing can hit its stride, leap outside the boundaries of everyday and commonplace usage and be something worth experiencing. If good writing exists, it is because someone cared enough to create and polish a new work of art. Someone struggled with their conjunctions and commas, fought with the adjectives and the adverbs, knew when to cut and throw away, figured out that humility was a virtue and that ego is death. They also knew when to stop.