strings of words and ideas

I'm currently fascinated by Paulo Coelho. Karl Langerfeld is still interesting, but his time is over for now. I finally got around to reading up about Coelho this afternoon, and on his wikipedia page I read this:

"Although Coelho has achieved great international success, his work has not been unanimously appreciated at home; his election to the Brazilian Academy of Letters proved controversial. Seen by some Brazilian literary critics as a lesser author whose material is too simplistic and similar to that of self-help books, criticism of his work arises mostly from his plain, direct style and borrowing of ideas from other authors. Additionally, his works in Portuguese contain grammatical errors and inaccuracies; some of these have been minimized in translation or altered in later editions." (5/20/07)

I have a lot to say in response to the first part of the paragraph, but let me just focus on the very last part, the part that says that his works in Portuguese contain grammatical errors and inaccuracies. Well, that was certainly not obvious to me since I've been reading his books in English. I'm now confused by what makes a good writer.

The way I see the world is this: many people are competent in a language and of those people, a subpopulation somehow manages to express themselves in a more creative, more thoughtful way than others. Those who don't know a language well usually don't have a desire to create works in that language. What happens if you're not comfortable in your native language, or any other language? (Sure sounds like the dilemma of the Singaporean.) What now, now that I know that Mr Coelho is a law school dropout and a world-famous Portuguese author who isn't comfortable with Portuguese grammar? And what is his editor doing anyway?

I'd always been bottom of my class in Chinese. We used to have to write stories for class, and I would often do poorly. Yet one of my stories was submitted by my Chinese teacher for the school publication. My story was accepted. It was a big deal for me because PRC students made up less than 10% of my school population but 90% of the works in the collection were written by someone from China. You probably don't believe me; I should have kept that book. Just for the record, I was not published in the collection of stories in English.

I think my grammar in Chinese is decent -- they don't really teach grammar to native speakers. My vocabulary was wanting -- my stories were written in the simplest of words. What prompted my teacher's choice of submission was the originality of idea, and a desire to encourage me. What I got out of it was that words don't matter; ideas and style do.

I dare say you'll find the same thing in my writings here. My English vocabulary is poor, but I make do with using the simplest words to express myself. There is a flow, a desire to communicate, to arouse feelings. Perhaps the simpler the words the better; the simpler the words the more easily understood and universal my writing becomes. Alright, maybe I am just lazy.

A writer is ultimately a word smith -- he takes what he has and puts it together. The skill lies in being able to string words and ideas together, not in owning a large collection of words. As for the grammatical part, leave it to the editor. We can't be good at everything.