Made well, shaped well, writing ceases to feel like artifice and becomes alive, and the moment that happens it ceases to be your own and becomes communal. There are creative writers who argue that you cannot be a good writer without also conducting your life with a degree of care, with a kindness, a kind of accounting for oneself within a larger community. William Carlos Williams went so far as saying that one reason to write was to become a better person. Richard Hugo reads this statement as a private understanding ‘that a lifetime of writing was a slow, accumulative way of accepting one's life as valid … what dumb animals know by instinct and reveal in their behavior: my life is all I've got’ (1979: 72).