Good writing should set us on a journey that takes us beyond itself, make us want nothing more than to know it inside and out.

I’m re-reading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet while writing a story because my tale involves one character reading a piece of one letter aloud to another. And as I re-read Rilke’s spare and simple words, I realize just how much they fit (especially the 4th) alongside the story I’m writing. But I can only offer a hint of his letters, a few well-chosen sentences. I can’t, as I wish I could, just reprint their entirety within my story. There’s just no room or reason for that.

I can’t even guarantee that someone who reads my story will know Rilke, that he was a poet, or that he wrote these letters. But I would like so much, I want so badly, for people to take the next step, to find Rilke’s letters, and to read them, and understand my story within this context, like a well-paired wine and cheese. So I realize something that’s been part of everything I’ve written, a value of mine that I only now understand consciously:

Good writing should encourage you to cut it open when its flesh is opaque, to lay bare its secrets and seeds, to look within and elsewhere to experience the whole of its character. It should not be tasteless to the unworldly tongue – flavor should be intrinsic to every word – but it should suggest a greater world of subtlety of tone, color, experience to those willing to go beyond the text. It should make us yearn to live the story; to know its place and its time, to breathe its air and learn its language, to feel the soil on which it was grown crumbling between our fingers, moist and rich.

Good writing should set us on a journey that takes us beyond itself, make us want nothing more than to know it inside and out.

“And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” – Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (4)