Good writers are rare — good Catholic writers, even rarer.

But now an author is giving us his insight into Catholic literature, from this interview with Zenit:

Good Catholic writers need to be sustained and nourished by a rich culture, and look to the great authors of the past for inspiration and guidance, says author Gregory Roper.

Roper, author of “The Writer’s Workshop: Imitating Your Way to Better Writing” (ISI Books), is an English professor at the University of Dallas.

In this interview with ZENIT, he discusses what future Catholic writers can do to become great Catholic writers.

Q: You grew up the in South and attribute your love of language to your father. Why do you think there is such a rich heritage of Catholic writers from the South, such as Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy?

Roper: Well, this is a phenomenon that has been studied extensively, precisely because there have been so many fine Southern writers, and because Southern literature was one of the first, like the Irish literature of the early 20th century, to show that a specific, grounded, regional literature could be universal and speak to universal truths. But a strange thing has happened: People have realized that all great writing is like this, grounded in the specific, regional voice of its time and place. Whether it is Homer or Shakespeare, Gabriele d’Annunzio or James Joyce, the vibrant voice comes out when it is grounded in the particular accents and idioms and phrasings of a people.

But to comment specifically on the South: I wonder if, because it was rural, agrarian, underdeveloped, and just plain hot and often humid, Southerners just moved more slowly, took their time more than other early 20th-century people. While T.S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky were showing a world increasingly hurried and dislocated and fragmented, Southerners were still sitting and talking, telling stories.

I’ll never forget my grandmother bustling about the kitchen, an entire state’s genealogy in her head, telling us stories about relatives we never knew we had, or my grandfather, seemingly asleep, toothpick in his mouth, in white cream recliner, correcting her on a minor point regarding which third cousin was married to whom. That tie to the concrete in which we find the universal — that is, the image — is what makes southern speech so vibrant.

Q: There seems to be a dearth of good Catholic literature in the world today, and with the ever-growing text-messaging culture, writing well seems to be threatened all the more. What other factors do you see working against the art of writing?

Roper: That’s a complex set of issues, but in some ways the answer is very simple, and I say it on the first pages of “The Writer’s Workshop”: People don’t read. Or they read, but they only read e-mails and self-help books, not the rich, sustaining literature that gives them a world in language.

My students who are already pretty darned good writers by the time they come to me all report the same thing: There was reading in their homes. There were magazines scattered about; there were regular trips to the library. Most of all, there was reading out loud, so they learned from mom’s dramatizations and dad’s different voices the beauty of words and the flow of a well-crafted sentence.

These students know how a sentence works; they know what a paragraph sounds and feels like; they know the rhythms of prose, and how different writers sound. As they matured, their parents directed them to better writing, and it grew with them. Most of them can’t tell you where they learned to write, but when you press them, this is the one factor that is always, always present. Conversely, for those who struggle in their writing, the one factor is almost always that they grew up in a family, and a wider culture, with very little reading.

Another problem is simply the poor state of teaching of grammar and usage in schools. You simply can’t write well without the basic tools, just like you cannot play an instrument well without being able to play scales and arpeggios and knowing the fingerings. But if you do know those things, and know them cold, you can then move on to make music.

This is where John Paul II’s wide concern with the culture at large was so significant; he saw that good theology, like good arts, good literature, comes from a rich, significant culture, and really can’t come about from a thin, harried, rushed, impatient culture, or one that doesn’t have a grasp on truth in its schools and other cultural organs.

Good Catholic writing will come from thoughtful Catholics, sustained by the culture of this new exciting “JPII Generation,” who will put words on a page to say the truth. I don’t think we should be worrying specifically about creating a Catholic literature, but about creating the culture that will nourish those who will write.

Check out the rest at the link.