Keenness is a brilliant quality for a writer to have, keenness in all its manifestations and meanings. My trusty Pocket Oxford defines it as eager and ardent, and if you are not eager to write and ardent about your subject matter then you will face an uphill struggle in your writing life.
The dictionary also defines keen as acute and highly perceptive - and intuitive perception about the way the world works and people's behaviour in it is an absolute necessity if you want to succeed as an author. If you aren't already, you need to train yourself to be observant and to develop a spontaneous interest in people: look and learn, look and learn, as Margaret Atwood says, it's all material.
Other definitions include penetrating and vivid and if either of these appeared in a review of your work, wouldn't you be over the moon? If you can bring penetrating insight to bear on your story, your narrative will be more vivid and this in turn will engage your reader more intensely -- you need to create the right environment for them to fall in love with your book -- in other words you want them to be as keen on it as you are.
Keen also has funereal overtones and as a writer, you may find yourself bewailing things from time to time: it is hard to come to the end of a piece of work when you had invested so much in it; harder still to send it out into the world and face the gamut of puzzling and confounding and - sometimes - joyous responses to it. So if you are keen in all the other senses of the word, be prepared to keen occasionally as well...
(A bookshop in the French book town of Cuisery that I was pretty keen on...)
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