This was originally published several years ago.

Celebrated author Anne Rivers Siddons, who wrote Heartbreak Hotel, Homeplace, Peachtree Road, and King’s Oak believes that “good writing is just about the most subjective thing” there is and “feels she is always at the edge of writing well but never succeeds.”

Now “deep into a new book” entitled Outer Banks, to be published in late July, she “follows a rigid schedule” when she is writing. “Ten to three, five days a week in the beginning and longer toward the end with a Saturday and/or Sunday thrown in.”

Siddons believes “that good writing requires thought and preparation.” For her last several books she has submitted outlines to her agent and editor. The Peachtree Road outline ran some 170 pages, leading an editor at Harper & Row to suggest wryly that perhaps they ought to publish the outline. For King’s Oak, Siddons did a 75 page outline to tie together “all the unfamiliar woods lore and ecological facts” informing that work.

But outlining is a recent thing for the prolific Georgia writer. She “wrote more from personal experience” in most of her previous books (Heartbreak Hotel, Homeplace, and her most recent Outer Banks) so that “emotional impact and memory delineated both the character development and plot.”

Siddons consider two of her books, The House Next Door and Fox’s Earth “potboilers” because they “catered to a specific audience more or less dictated by the publishing house”

Anne Rivers Siddons “goes about writing well by preparing for the task over a two or three month period of thinking and planning” but does not begin writing until “that little voice” tells her it’s time. Once she starts writing, she does not rewrite very much. Her editors don’t usually change much in her work though Fox’s Earth was cut by 300 ms. pages because her then publisher, Simon & Schuster, “couldn’t afford to publish a 750-page novel by a virtual unknown. They had to get the book under 600 pages to keep its price under $19.”

For Siddons, “there is no formula to writing well” but she is convinced that she would not have had a literary career were it not for the fact that she began reading at the age of five–much to the displeasure of her mother and the Fairburn, Georgia public library–and grown up an only child “with her nose in a book every possible moment.”

There is a telling irony in the history of this well-received and popular author–one reminiscent of the famous incident in which little Einstein’s teachers feared the boy retarded. Siddons’ degree was in illustration. She took only one creative writing course in college (Auburn ‘58) and got a ‘C.’ (!)

Pearl Cleage is the editor of Catalyst magazine and author of Mad at Miles: A Blackwoman’s Guide to Truth, a collection of essays, as well as a volume of fiction and poetry called The Brass Bed and Other Stories. The most important thing in writing, she believes, is that “a good writer has to be prepared to see the truth and tell the truth.”

Cleage says that to write well “you must write all the time. It’s real important for writers to practice to get good at the technical side so you can better communicate with people.”

She doesn’t “really think about writing well because if you’re going to write–at least anything other than a journal, something you want other people to read–you’ve got to have a certain amount of confidence that you can give people another way to look at something. The main thing I think about is clarity. I feel satisfied [with a piece] if it achieves my intentions.”

Robert Earl Price, poet and author of Blood Lines and Blood Elegy, thinks there are many defining characteristics of good writing but two are most basic. “Obviously, it has to appeal to the audience for which it was intended,” he says, “And second, it should reveal something about the human condition.”

How does Price go about writing well? “Study, practice, and work,” he says, “though maybe not in that order. If you’re going to write you have to study both writing and the world in which you live: history, sociology, medicine, and so on, so you have something to write/talk about.

“You have to work at it and hopefully find markets and places to practice the craft,” Price says. The most vital thing for the beginning writer, he believes, is “to read with an analytical eye, reading people you like and seeing how they do it.”

Price says he no longer has as strict of a daily routine as he did when he started writing. “Early on I was disciplined. I set aside about four hours a day to write. I’m a little more flexible now but I still try to write about two hours every day.”

Price is “never” really finished with a piece. “Even stuff that I’ve published, I’d like to keep on editing. At some point you’re not ashamed to show it to strangers. If we’re brutally honest in comparing ourselves to writers we like we find a point where we like our own.”

June Akers Seese, author of Near Occasions of Sin, Claudia and a Long Line of Women, What Waiting Really Means, believes the two most defining characteristics of good writing are “honesty and specificity.” Her way of writing fiction well is to “begin with a pice of dialogue that I’ve actually heard someone say which has significance to me personally. Form that I build a character.”

She feels finished with a piece, “when I’ve cut it to the bone, usually revising at least a dozen times.”

Hall Winslow is a freelance journalist and poet. Three of his poems were published in Poem in the Fall of ‘89. Three more are slated to come out in the same magazine this year and another poem will be published this year in Windless Orchard.

The characteristics of good writing, Winslow believes, cannot be outlined in a general sense because “it depends on the purpose, whether amusement, stimulation, an invitation to feeling or whatever. Each form has its own demands [and] values.”

How does he go about writing well? “I’m not sure that I do (laugh),” he says. “In non-fiction I try to say things in a pungent manner and be clear. In poetry I try to be clear but also to stimulate with poetic devices like distinctive words, implied and obvious metaphors, the use of rhythm.”

Beverly Head is an Associate Professor of English at Atlanta Metropolitan College and a poet who won the 1986 Bronze Jubilee award for a body of work. She has published poetry in the Atlanta magazines Catalyst and Cotton Boll.

Head advises writers starting out to “try to start with personal experience and things they know about rather than things they’ve only heard about.”

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