I just picked up Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. I'm only about six pages in, but am already finding myself again astonished by her wonderful, poetic prose.
When I was in college, I wrote an entire essay about these two paragraphs in Cather's novel My Antonia:
Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disc rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it.In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disc; the handles, the tongue, the share--black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.
Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.
Whenever I read something so exquisitely descriptive, capturing a moment in time so perfectly, I can't help but think, Oh, geez. I could never do that.
Thoughts like this can often lead to a writer's most potent enemy: self doubt. To combat these feelings of never being good enough, I have to give myself a pep-talk. I tell myself that, no, I will never be able to write like Cather, or Kafka or Hemmingway or anyone else. I can only write like me and that has to be good enough for me.
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