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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