I have been thinking about writing styles and content yesterday and today. Part of the reason was that I finished Walter Mosley's short story collection, Walking the Dog. It is not Mosley's use of language that makes him such a good writer. In fact, his literary fiction is somewhat marred by awkward phrasing and repetitious use of descriptions. These shortcomings may occur because he did not start out as a writer of literary fiction, but as a mystery writer. He has gradually graduated to speculative fiction and domestic realism.

What makes Mosley's work memorable is the characterization. The hero of Walking the Dog, Socrates Fortlow, is a killer and a philosopher. This daunting combination would frighten most writers away. Mosley revels in it. Fortlow is both Everyman and the Other. He must attempt to make a living in contemporary Los Angeles while battling an array of domestic difficulties, poverty and racism every day. And, he must learn to do so without killing. Since the crime of passion double murder that sent him to prison for 27 years, Fortlow has killed other people and murders an assailant during the course of the book, which consists of interrelated short stories. His life embodies all three of the conflicts fiction writers mine — man against society, man against man, and man against himself.

An intriguing aspect of this is the contrast between Mosley's life and those of many of the characters he writes about, including Socrates Fortlow. The writer has been a middle-class African-American more familiar with writers conferences and film sets than ghetto diners and jail cells for most of his life. Yet, he is still able to write about the lives of people deprived of such options without making them caricatures. That is a welcome relief in a time when so many writers of literary fiction write only about themselves and other people just like them.

Another reason I'm thinking of reading and writing is blogger Patrick Ruffini and his recent pronouncement about the superiority of bloggers of the Right in regard to writing ability, content and independent thinking.

Part of the disparity also seems to lie in subject matter. The four top lefty bloggers focus pretty exclusively on political or Administration (sic) news. The six top "righties" ? InstaPundit (France, nanotech, "crushing of dissent"), Sullivan (The New York Times, gay rights), Volokh (law), LGF (Arafat), Lileks (life), and Den Beste (general global strategy) are all beautiful prose stylists but tend to be more over-the-board and are sometimes lacking in the hardcore political coverage we all crave from time to time.

I don't know enough about Ruffini to say whether he is too ignorant of good writing to recognize it when he sees it, though that is my suspicion. How else could someone believe the puerile reportage of Andrew Sullivan or the shameful to a gifted six grader verbal grappling of Steven Den Beste are exquisite? As for the InstaPundit, he mainly produces a list of links, hardly something subject to the devices of good writing at all.

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