The striving that great art can be a "work of a free, unfettered, uncorrupted imagination" is an intriguing, worthy goal that should motivate everybody. Think of the alternative. Isn't that what we are in fact living? Isn't the "detachment and truth" that great art seeks to represent, the thing that captures our attention? Or is it merely the beauty or the message of a great photograph or a great painting, that captures our imagination?

Iris Murdoch thinks that the common need to be understood moves everything, and there is a great degree of merit in that opinion. Consequently, her ideas of what it takes to write a good book are very intriguing and worth considering. After all, while great art and great ideas live in all of us, it is the writers who relentlessly think and work at their craft without pause, who are best able to spread their great ideas.

Here's some of what Iris Murdoch has shared;

"To write a good book you have to have certain qualities. Great art is connected with courage and truthfulness. There is a conception of truth, a lack of illusion, an ability to overcome selfish obsessions, which goes with good art, and the artist has got to have that particular sort of moral stamina. Good art, whatever its style, has qualities of hardness, firmness, realism, clarity, detachment, justice, truth. It is the work of a free, unfettered, uncorrupted imagination. Whereas bad art is the soft, messy self-indulgent work of an enslaved fantasy. Pornography is at one end of that scale, great art at the other end.

I'd want to make a distinction between fantasy and imagination, not the same as Coleridge's, but a distinction between the separation of immediate selfish feelings and the elimination of yourself in a work of art. The most obvious case of the former would be the novel where the writer is the hero and he is always succeeding. He doesn't succeed at first, but he's very brave, and all the girls like him, and so on...That tends to spoil the work...what is important is to have an ability to have an image of perfection and to expel fantasy and the sort of lesser, egoistic cravings and the kind of imagery and immediate expressions that might go with them, and to be prepared to think and to wait.

It is one of the main charms of the art form and its prime mode of exposition. A novel without a story must work very hard in other ways to be worth reading, and indeed to be read. Some of today’s antistory novels are too deliberately arcane. I think story is essential to the survival of the novel. Stories are a fundamental human form of thought."

Stories come in all shapes and sizes. W. H. Auden celebrated the meaning of words because physical force takes over when they lose it (their meaning).

Truman Capote was a classroom dunce (according to the evaluation of his teachers) but he was a genius if the scientific value of Intelligent Quotient tesing is recognized and acknowledged. I am not in a position to argue with a genius proclaimed by the scientific IQ test.

John Updike lauded the "hope of being read, of being heard, and enjoyed after death".

Alfred Kazin called himself "a professional writer" if that is even possible to define but in my opinion, he is just a critic who ridicules other writers for being themselves and if that's not as petty as it gets, how do you explain the current, republican party?

Why bother burning the book when you can burn the writer instead?

Writing is not about negative criticism, per se, it is about developing clarity through the courageous and difficult task of being honest and Alix Kates Shulman essentially explained that when she wrote; "To me writing always involves reassessing one's life and coming to some larger understanding".

Ms. Shulman called this practice "evolutionary adaption for survival", a process that involves memory as much as it involves imagination and that explains the creative writing process rather well.

William Steig seeks to enhance the sense of wonder, especially for children, and that is the purpose of his work.

James Jones (From Here to Eternity) wrote about the suffering and struggle of war, a lifelong battle that never ended because the fierce individualist toiled perpetually with what he called "writing and in putting down the truth of life." Admirably, he lived his gift.

According to Ralph Elison, the novel describes and creates or shapes experience. That is why he wrote "The Invisible Man" and disappeared -he was a genuine artist to the bone.

Joseph Heller celebrated his demons and buried signs of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder through his satire, Catch-22. We underestimate the influence of the consciousness of danger that preoccupies people who suffer from PTSD and Catch 22 is ultimately society's periodic method of justifying the absurd. After all, you are not officially crazy unless a psychiatrist says so, and if you deny it, it is because crazy people are not in a position to know any better. Isn't that the myth?

In interview, Heller's uncompromising intellect was exposed when he said that "Catch-22", set during world war 2, was also about "the destruction of patriotism, because financial considerations transcend national boundaries." An intellectual who went beyond the claim that history repeats, Heller warned that history consciously repeats and that is a revelation that is both tragic and hopeful at the same time.

Seymour Britchky stuck a dagger in the heart of every pompous authority when he said, "the first function of a critic, any kind of critic-is to describe, so that the reader learns about the subject rather than the critic." Those who have to consult authority to shield their own ignorance are a special kind of stupid.

Susan Sontag was born to be a writer. In 1948, at age 15, she wrote;

"It is difficult for the citizens of America, having never seen their country devasted by war to really understand and appreciate the full horror of war. The battle for peace will never be won by calling anybody whom we don't like a communist. If we do this, we will somehow realize that in our efforrt to preserve our democatic way of life we have somehow thrown away its noblest feature - the right of evey person to express his own opinion and vote as he pleases."

During the height of the Vietnam war, she wrote, "At this moment, firm bodied children are being charred by napalm bombs. Young men, Vietnamese and American, are falling like trees, to lie forever, their faces in the mud. As writers, guardians of language, we may perceive ourselves as having a vocational connection with the truth -that is of seriousness. Let's be serious."

We are still not serious because we are still overly judgmental rather than judicious. And what does serious look like in today's terms? Susan even made that rather plain when she said, "I am interested in people having a historical understanding of where we are so that we can better defend ourselves and stop international terrrorism."

James Baldwin somewhat similarily realized "that to try to be a writer (which involves, after all, disturbing the peace) was political, whether one liked it or not; because if one is doing anything at all one is trying to change the consciousness of other people."

Next: Secrecy is destructive because history repeats.