Writing from the mind? Well enough. But writing from the heart is another thing altogether.
Writing from the heart means facing down the feelings that threaten to overwhelm. It means sitting with the uncomfortable sense of being plunged into darkness with only a thin beam of light to guide the way.
The writing that comes from the heart is sturdy, stirring, true, and good. But it isn’t easily obtained. Indeed, the person wishing to write such material is often asked to evince a certain fearlessness – a reckless disregard, even, for that most precious commodity, his ego.
To write from the heart, a writer must strip himself to the bone and deal unflinchingly with what he sees. He must take it all in – the good, the bad, and the ugly – and seek to understand how it all hangs together, and what it means. Or perhaps he leaves the task of understanding aside, merely striving to reproduce what he has found, like an ornithologist recording in his log-book the movements of birds, except that he is recording the movements of human emotions: fear, sadness, anger, joy.
Is he up to the task? Is he armed with enough courage to walk through a landscape of his own human longing and regret?
His writing will reveal him. If he’s entered the depths and returned to tell the tale, his words will strike you with their sincerity, heft, and, quite possibly, beauty. For the heart, after all, doesn’t bother with trying to look perfect or funny or smart. It’s too busy feeling and loving and suffering the pangs of human experience – and there’s usually no room for artifice amidst all that.