If you care at all about good writing, and you haven't yet purchased a copy of The Atlantic's fiction edition, do so right away, while there are still some left at the newsstands. A writer friend told me a few months back that they are moving their offices to Washington, D.C., which saddens me because I suspect this city will do to the magazine what it does to many people -- coarsens them, dulls them, leaves them obsessed with the very small and ill-tuned to the very important threads of life.

But for now it remains the finest magazine in the universe. The essays and short stories in this issue have got me to thinking about the craft of writing, and how my own writing, -- and life, for that matter -- when surveyed from a distance, has the look of an onion, with successive layers peeled away, some easily, others only with much digging and scratching and tears. To write well is to dig for truth, though it be layered with inventions and contrivances, at its core it bears truth. But to tell truth is to offend, and to strive boldly for truth, arms flailing like an idiot in an all-out sprint for it, is to be wrong at times. This offends in a very different way, but it offends nonetheless.

So as I peel back the layers I wrestle with this problem more and more, and sometimes the words of one of my movie bad-guy heroes, Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessep, come roaring to the forefront of my brain: you can't handle the truth!

But it seems that the alternative is to choke on it, and that's not worked so well either. More on that another time, perhaps. This is all just an introduction to two things I've recently read that I want to share with you. The first comes from Saul Bellow, whose 1963 comments on the topic of moralism in writing are excerpted in the aforementioned issue of The Atlantic:

A book which is lacking in power cannot be moral. Dullness is worse than obscenity. A dull book is wicked. It may intend to be as good as gold, as nice as pie, as sweet as can be, but if it is banal and boring, it is evil...

And this is why I increasingly find my stomach turning when I survey the fiction shelves of Christian bookstores. We are a people called to seek, pursue, and speak truth. That we tolerate such untruth as is found in poor writing and music is a shameful thing, and I suspect that the net effect is indeed wicked.

The second item comes from Stephen King's wonderful book, On Writing. I grew up reading King, and I confess that I was surprised when I got to college and found out that my tastes in reading, like so much else, were proletarian and shabby. I spent too many years thinking poorly of myself for this, and am only now coming around to the suspicion that it's okay to believe in my soul that post-modern, magical realist, nihilistic literature is a load of horse manure peddled by pedantic twits who spent too long at the feet of their clever, small-minded teachers, that much of what passes for art in the museums littering our nation's capital has no more heart than a talk show host, and that a lot of high-brow poetry doesn't make a damned bit of sense.

Or maybe I'm just not smart enough to get it. We shouldn't go ruling that hypothesis out too quickly. But back to Stephen King. Here's the part I want to share:

I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.

If you tell the truth, don't let anyone make you feel lousy. More on that later as well, perhaps.

Okay, enough for now, except for one more thing. If you never saw or read it, check out King's acceptance speech at the 2003 National Book Awards. Classic, and classy, and right on.