I like to think that practice and passion are the necessary elements for good writing. Structure and style, prose and poetics: these follow effortlessly from the deliberate declaration of your voice.
My aspiration is only to communicate the motifs comprising the human condition.
A side thought: A friend and I were talking the other day about writing and what it took to write well. My initial inclination was to say that practice and passion have been the driving force behind any great writer. But then we thought about those people who are just great at communicating ideas clearly without much practice or passion for the subject. I think we decided that the art of writing is like the art of drawing. The more you do it the better. But what’s most important are the ideas. You can’t draw something you cannot conceive. Likewise it is with writing. Ideas make writers great. If you work at communicating these, all else follows.
William Dare 