Beauty, Truth, and Goodness: Three Lights for the Writer's Craft

The Metaphor That Changed Everything

When Ocean Vuong spoke of Eduardo Corral's line in a recent interview, moss grows along the tree like applause it clapped, it surged upward in silent ovation, a green thunder rolling slow across bark, each spore a tiny hand raised with wonder. In that instant, the shame I have at times carried about my writing dissolved like mist under sudden sun.

For years, writing has come to me the way a child presses his face to the glass of a world that has no ready words. Sentences arrive half-formed, lush with feeling but not yet pinned to the page and often conveying and idea without adequate language. Editors called it indulgent. Workshops called it unclear. It felt like failure.

But Corral's moss shows another truth: it was not failure but a brave and risky way at grasping the ephemeral in a way most writers are too afraid to try.

Here are the three lights for the writer's craft.

The First Light: Beauty

Beauty is not the polite beauty of tidy prose. It is the wild, estranging beauty that refuses to mimic the world but pull the Word out from beyond it. Babel gave us a sunset rolling across hills "as if beheaded." Corral gave us moss that claps. Both say a thing never said before.

When the sentence carries not just tenor to vehicle but the behavior of one thing into the bones of another, a reader can suddenly feel the low red sun moving faster or the moss surging with reckless joy. Beauty is not decoration. It is the moment the created and Creator leans close and a peice of God is seen

The Second Light: Truth

Ocean spoke of recognition before correction, of suspending the dogmas that say a poem "shouldn't be like this." Truth is not the invisible newspaper sentence that walks into the room and sits down. Truth is the threshold, the infinite instants between bud and rose where the rose is still tearing itself open."

The world does not always arrive with dictionary definitions. Sometimes it arrives as applause growing on bark. Sometimes it arrives as the Vietnamese word for sadness, which carries the a monsoon in its vowels, while the English word feels like a single dry leaf. Meaning is learned in use, not definition.

To write truthfully is to refuse the homogenization that has already turned our sentences into right angles. Straight lines do not exist in nature and cannot do so in the page if one is to attempt to capture Truth.

The Third Light: Goodness

Goodness in writting is more than virtue, but the daring of the action. It is not safe. It is the skater throwing himself off the eight-stair set with no guarantee of landing, for the delight of attempt and in it that momentary stillness of joy. It is the poet spending nine years on forty-five pages so that moss might finally be allowed to clap.

We are told to fear losing the reader, to keep the butler-sentence polite and invisible. But Goodness says: pursue the boundary precisely so the reader might cross it with you for one trembling moment. Not at the expense of clarity, but at the chance of revelation. Let the veil part. Let the soul feel what only words, strangely arranged, can make it feel.

The Covenant to The Three Lights for the Writer's Craft

Writers are not here to produce. They are here to enchant in a disenchanted age. The culture has tamed the sentence into efficiency. The publishing machine wants comps and comps only. The workshop wants correction. Against all of this, the moss of our metaphors must be allowed to spread.

The covenant, then, is this:

• Write for Beauty, that the veil might thin.

• Write for Truth, that the threshold might be honored.

• Write for Goodness, that the soul might feel the light of the Creator the way only words, wild, disobedient, and alive, can make it feel.

And if the sentence sometimes grows too ambitiously, too wordlessly, too much like moss on bark, then let it. Somewhere, a reader who has waited their whole life for exactly this strange green thunder will feel, for one holy instant, free.

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Izaic Yorks is a Catholic fantasy and scifi author, who loves writing with unhindered expression in genres that want clean and neat — in order to reach the unsaid things of the soul. If you love this kind of writing then check out my epic fantasy book AITHOS: An epic fantasy with a grimdark edge, where a uniquely corrupted magic system and a world built on disability prejudice follow introspective misfits through war, politics, and psychological depths—perfect for fans of Brandon Sanderson, Joe Abercrombie, and Patrick Rothfuss.