Harry Potter's all right, I guess. He's a place to start. But let's not stop with him.

I'm glad he's done so well. But the scale of the success J. K. Rowling has achieved — let alone what Dan Brown has managed with a much less accomplished work — can fool an inexperienced reader or an aspiring writer. Writing can be so much more than this — not more difficult, but more beautiful, more musical, more accomplished, more exacting, more capable of changing and improving us all.

I'm not talking about writing that is beautiful or experimental or shocking for its own sake. That would be self-indulgence; and we have enough of that already. The writing we need may be plain or extravagant, but it will be carefully made and mindful of its readers (of their humanity, of their hope for wisdom and music and meaning). I don't want it to be purple, but I'd like it to sing. My book has been a short cry — a yelp — for grace. It hopes to encourage a more accomplished, artful, and honest kind of prose — writing that aims to do more than merely get a tale told.

“The good writer,” John Steinbeck said, “works at the impossible. There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights.”