Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Writing and talent


Yesterday I wrote about getting defensive about Hip Hop on August 21st. On August 22nd I got defensive about writing. They go together in a way that I will probably bring together in a grand unified theory of things that annoy me tomorrow.

It started simply enough with Charles Bivona, poet and writing professor, tweeting about how writing isn't born, but is taught and developed. He pointed to the main common denominator between various great writers was great suffering. As they came to terms with that, perhaps trying to find words for their feelings was the path that led them to being great writers.

It sounded reasonable enough, but it drew a lot of fire. Initially the discussion was simply reminding me of something I had already written about, where there is this kind of snobbery about writing that nothing I have seen bears out.

(That post covers a lot, and is lengthy, so I will link to it at the bottom.)

Let me go back to reviewing music for a moment. My biggest complaint is usually a lack of depth. They play their instruments well, and they are enthusiastic, so there is nothing wrong with it, but there is also nothing new. The bands that do have a unique voice, and can say different things in different ways, are the ones that truly stay with me.

Sometimes I feel like a band is young, and they will get more interesting just doing what they are doing. With others it feels like maybe they need to take six months off to dig wells in Africa or help at an orphanage in Central America -- just something to give them a bigger view of the world. And there are others that I sense will never grow; they are content the way they are. Who they are comes out in their songs. This is even more true for writers.

There is room for a lot of disagreement on who is a great writer. There are writers who write well, but whom I do not enjoy, often because of how much they seem to hate people. I won't begrudge those who do love them. I have my own.

One nice piece of symmetry was that Bivona referred to neuroscience and later that day my new Psychology Today (October 2014) had an interesting Q&A with Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist who has come out with a new style guide, The Sense of Style, because one important part of writing is understanding how your reader thinks. (Another article brought together Leo Tolstoy and Mischel's marshmallow test, so that was kind of fun as well.)

A good sense of empathy might be helpful for writing, in that without studying the cognitive processes you could still have a sense of your reader. Depth and experience helps. Certainly a good vocabulary helps, but it can also hinder as some writers end up with a prose that is too dense to be effective. I do remember learning that if a writer is making a few different mistakes, correcting one tends to resolve the others as well, because it changes how they think. That sounds like writing is something that can be taught.

It really did seem like for some people who cling to a belief in innate writing talent it was because they needed to feel gifted and special. I don't have a lot of patience with that in general, but what really angers me is that it might hold someone else back.

Writing, as part of communication, is one of the most important skills we can have. To be able to tell your story, so that all stories get told, is vital. We have enough of a problem as society getting people to even consider the possibility that something outside their experience can be true; we should at least make sure that we aren't doing anything to block evidence.

Writing is not just how we learn to understand each other, but how we learn to understand our selves. Sometimes I know that the writing I am doing is to figure something out, but it has helped so many times when it was not even deliberate. People need that, and they will become better for developing it, if they aren't discouraged.

I joke that I have no fast twitch muscle fibers. It is true that you can be genetically more likely to do well at sports, and that my genetics do not seem to lead that way. However, if in grade school, when we were running laps, someone had talked to us about proper form, and building up lung capacity, that would have been good to learn then instead of now. If someone had explained how to use legs on the rope climb, maybe I could have done it. I have to go through a lot of work now on reconnecting with my body because it seemed to be a hopeless case at a very early age, and no one told me any differently.

The teenagers I talk to now are so quick to give up. They don't think that they can draw or write or learn an instrument. I do think the constantly connected instantly updated culture is a part of that, but it is vital for their happiness that they do learn to try more than once, and concentrate, and persist. Therefore, someone who will tell them that innate talent is a necessity for any kind of success has just made an already difficult situation worse.

And they get an easy out, because if the beginner does persist, and gets really good at it, then they can always just assume that person must have had innate talent.

But maybe, really what you have is a person developing their humanity, looking inward and reaching outward, because writing can do that.

Don't discourage that.



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