What’s the ultimate in writing? What is ultimate that you can strive for, the finest; the peak; the absolute top of the writing profession? Would it be the Great American novel? (I don’t care for the term “American” to refer to only the United States. Let’s call it the Great United States novel.) That might be one way of defining it, but I think there’s a better way to define the ultimate in writing. To me, the highest point in writing would be writing not what you want to say, but what the reader wants to read. As a writer matures in his/her craft, putting thoughts down on paper or screen in some coherent order so that the reader can glean some sort of valuable information out of them, said writer eventually should come to the point where the message of that writing is accepted smoothly and effortlessly, incorporated into the readers intellect without question and accepted without further deliberation. That to me, would be the ultimate.
Is that possible? Probably not. There are, of course, millions of readers (actually, billions in the case of some forms of writing, such as news) and it seems extremely unlikely that any writer will ever reach that point for all of them. But in some genres of writing, such as science fiction (which is what I write), readers have come to know what they like to read, and they tend to read certain authors, their “favorite” authors, precisely because the flow of information is examined and received, as I noted above, smoothly and effortlessly. But there probably are millions of them in just the USA for example, and no writer is ever going to “get” to all of them, try as we might. It’s extremely unlikely that I ever will.
But that doesn’t stop a writer. Or me. I’m currently in process of getting my third sci-fi novel (the third in my Anthanian Imperative trilogy) ready for publication. I like to think that I’ve matured somewhat in my writing, eliminating unnecessary words and phrases, describing people, places, things and events more exactly and simply, and delving into the minds of my characters more naturally and unaffectedly, though in the long run it’s up to my readers to make that determination. Not me. The ultimate still remains, however, and any writer with a little determination and resolve will continue to struggle toward that ultimate goal, with the idea in mind of writing in such a way that his ideas can be understood in a manner that all his/her readers enjoy.