Great Writers Teach Great Lessons

I had an epiphany yesterday when I was writing the blog post about super-empowered individuals. I thought I would save it for today.

My realization is that, as writers, we are all super-empowered individuals. Whether we write non-fiction, fiction, or poetry. Our writing has the ability to entertain, to inform, to argue, to make people laugh and make them cry. We even have the ability to change minds. All with the written word. Not everyone can do that.

Consider the great works of fiction. Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath brought to light the plight of the migrant farmworker. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, fueled the abolitionist movement and is considered by many to have contributed to the Civil War. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair revealed the Chicago meat-packing industry.

There are countless works of non-fiction and poetry that have done the same thing. Woodward and Bernstein brought down the Nixon administration with their reporting in the Watergate Scandal. The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock inspired a generation of writers and other youth. Let’s not forget Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. Every writer draws their inspiration from those words, whether you have ever read them or not.

What’s that, I hear? You question whether your writing is good enough? Mark Twain was tortured by self-doubt for most of his career. Today Huckleberry Finn is standard reading material in many schools(when it is not being censored by idiots). Several of Twain’s stories, including The Mysterious Stranger, Letters from the Earth, and the essay What is Man?, changed my life.

So, yes, I think as writers we are super-empowered. We have the ability to tell stories—and sometimes they make a difference.

See ya’ later

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Illustration by Thibault fr (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Comments

[WattsLK]

Hi Tim,

Yes I agree. I love receiving fan mail from America because that means I have touched people with my words on an international scale. There's no better feeling than that. Isn't it amazing at the click of a button people from all over the world can read your work.