Post by mfelizandy on Feb 9, 2009 1:48:08 GMT
There are a lot of things one doesn't get taught in "Creative Writing" classes. I've taken several, and none of them have ever offered good nuts and bolts instruction on how to write well--but I think there's an even more destructive and discouraging problem facing would-be writers--the idea of an inherent creative talent. This fallacy says that some people are just naturally gifted writers/musicians/artists/whatever, and that if you weren't lucky enough to be born with that special neural wiring, you'll have to be content as a passive consumer of someone else's creativity. I think this is why writing and art classes are the way they are, and that it costs our society a lot of creative expression. I've thought about it, in the context of my own experiences, and while I don't have empirical evidence to back it up, I think my reasoning makes sense. For those who like pithy shorthand phrases, "Talent is shorthand for practice."
For the record, I first wrote the following as an LJ post some years ago.
I've had a lot of people tell me that I'm a "talented" or "gifted" writer over the years. Like most people, I love to hear that I'm wonderful and special in some way. My writing is one of the few things I'll freely admit to being vain about. But I've thought about it as an adult, and I've come to the conclusion that it's not really a matter of talent. Talent is at most a head start, a leg up. The "gift" involved lies in the interest in learning how to do creative work well, and sticking with it.
Notice that I say "creative work". I'm not talking about a talent for sports. That is at least partially dependent on one's physical build. Creative arts, on the other hand, are dependent on what goes on inside the skull of the artist.
I still have the very first story I ever wrote. I dictated it to my mother when I was five. She typed it out for me, and left big spaces for me to draw the pictures to go with it. Then she laminated the pages and pinned them together with shiny brass brads. Every now and then, when plumbing the Depths of My Most Archaic Papers, I come across that first story, and reread it. It's both painful and pleasurable. Pleasurable, because hey, this is what started it all! Painful, because it's pretty darn obvious that was my first story.
Note the heavy involvement of my mother in this. Mom (an elementary school teacher) taught me to read so early I can't remember not knowing how. She and my dad were and are bibliophiles, the sort of people who read for pleasure. I was also raised by a family of storytellers. When my family gets together, we cook a big meal, then sit around the dinner table for hours afterward telling and retelling stories. So one could say I was primed by my parents to be interested in books, and given highly-informal training by my entire extended family on How To Tell A Story.
When I started school, then, I was a nascent bookworm with a first fiction story under my belt. I think that was the root of my "talent". When asked to write a story by a teacher, I could draw from what I had picked up from books and my family's talkative get-togethers. I was further along the learning curve than some of my classmates, so to the teacher I appeared to have a talent for writing. If you tell a kid she's a good writer, she's likely to write more, in the hopes of winning more approval. Thus the self-sustaining cycle gets started.
I've been writing fiction, off and on, ever since that first story at age five. I still have some of the stuff I've produced over the years, and I've reread it as an adult. What's most interesting about it is that I see many of the same mistakes I've made in the past repeated in other people's work. Based on that highly-unscientific observation, I've concluded that there's no mysterious innate ability to write that I have and other people don't. I've simply had more practice at it.
I've got a real-life example to back up my assertion. When I was in fifth grade, I joined the school band. I played trombone. For years, I sort of limped along. I was utterly flabbergasted when Mr. Tipkemper, the junior high band director, picked me to join the jazz band. I still have my official jazz band shirt--it was one of my most treasured possessions for several years. After some ups and downs involving Dad getting transferred, I landed in a high school band program that bred fanatical devotion and trained very good musicians. Those were the years I practiced, hard. It paid off in my getting a seat in the top concert band of the three. Now, the guys who sat first chair were good. Really good. One of them was called "talented", and he really could play well. I don't know how much or if he practiced at all. The point, however, was that I could very nearly keep up with him. I didn't have talent--I don't have perfect pitch and I still have problems with sight-reading and sixteenth notes--but I got to be a fairly good trombone player. I probably could have majored in music at college, if I'd been interested in dealing with the theory classes.
Think about it, y'all. Artists, how many sketchbooks have you filled? I've got a file box of old letters I wrote, stories at various stages of completion, the "free verse" I slipped into as a teenager. A substantial chunk of my hard drive is devoted to bits and pieces of stories at various stages of completion. All of you out there who look at someone else's work and say, "I'll never be that good", take heart! There is no wall called "Talent" blocking your way up the learning curve.
All of that said, I think there is something that makes it a lot harder for people to learn the creative arts. For some reason, there is a lurking idea (at least in US culture) that one should not enroll in a drawing class, or a writing class, unless one is already fairly good at it, or "talented". Think about that for a moment. Does it make any sense to say, "Oh, I'd like to learn to speak Japanese, but I'm no good at it right now, so I'm not going to make a fool of myself and take a class in it"? No--but substitute "draw" or "write stories" for "speak Japanese", and all of a sudden the sentence becomes plausible. You might have heard your friends say something akin to it, or even have said it yourself. Why? In most educational endeavors, the beginning student is expected to bring only a willingness to learn. But the arts--for some reason there is a common expectation on the part of both teacher and student that the student will begin the class halfway through the syllabus, so to speak. It's not a universal expectation, I've found an exception to the rule here and there, but nine times out of ten, you'll bump into this attitude. Which means that budding artists and writers give up too early. They make a few tries, but when the results aren't what they'd hoped for, and there's no more-experienced artist on hand to explain what they need to do to do better next time, the rookies get frustrated and give up. It's at that starting stage that people most need guidance and encouragement--and most don't get it. I did, and because I was five I wasn't fazed by the fact that my first effort wasn't of professional quality. I would guess artists are the same way--catch a kid young enough, and start her climbing the learning curve before she gets self-conscious enough to notice that her drawings aren't comparable to Leonardo's work, and by the time said youngster is old enough to compare her work to that of others, she's climbed far enough that people are telling her she's "talented".
That self-consciousness, the embarrassment of being less skilled than someone else, can be shrunk and put in its place. The key to it, in my experience, is to learn to enjoy the fact that to be human is to be occasionally ridiculous. Most of the time, I'm a reasonably competent adult, capable of handling any number of situations that pop up in my life. Then again, every now and then, I make an utter fool of myself. Like being the one who marches off to the right while the rest of the band goes to the left. Or discovering that I've just spent three hours running errands...wearing a pair of pants with a big hole in the rear end. There are two ways to react to that kind of thing. One is to be mortified. The other is to have a good laugh at yourself.
Another obstacle facing the person wishing to become a writer is the fact that most writing classes are more of a hindrance than a help. I don't know whether the same syndrome affects art classes, but of all the writing classes I've taken, only one ever offered any instruction in the actual craft of writing a good story. There are established conventions and techniques in fiction writing, and they can be laid out in reasonably plain language and demonstrated to students. The conventions and standard tricks of the trade exist for a very good reason--readers respond to them.
Take, for example, the FMA character named Colonel Roy Mustang. A writer can use just his name to set the mood for a scene. If he meets a woman who greets him as "Colonel", it lends a certain formality to the dialogue that follows. If the colonel meets a woman who greets him as "Roy", it creates a more casual atmosphere. The same trick can be used to mark changes in a character's current mindset. It's a relatively minor bit of storycraft, but it's the sort of thing that a beginning writer should be taught.
Instead, so-called "writing classes" seem designed to enhance the difficulty of learning to write the sort of story other people would want to read. I started college as a Creative Writing major, and changed my major in disgust after discovering that the profs who were supposed to be teaching writing technique were hell-bent on teaching students everything but the fundamentals. My freshman year writing professor was a leftover beatnik who just couldn't believe anyone would actually want to write a story in third-person or the past tense. His idea of teaching was to tell the class, over and over, about the "author" who wrote random words on a pack of cards, then shuffled them up. The reader was to shuffle the pack, then read the words on the cards as they came up. Excuse me? Sorry, that's not writing. I could call it many things, but it's not fiction writing.
...So that's what I have to say on the concept of talent. Next: Some of my tips and tricks, in whatever order they pop to mind.
For the record, I first wrote the following as an LJ post some years ago.
I've had a lot of people tell me that I'm a "talented" or "gifted" writer over the years. Like most people, I love to hear that I'm wonderful and special in some way. My writing is one of the few things I'll freely admit to being vain about. But I've thought about it as an adult, and I've come to the conclusion that it's not really a matter of talent. Talent is at most a head start, a leg up. The "gift" involved lies in the interest in learning how to do creative work well, and sticking with it.
Notice that I say "creative work". I'm not talking about a talent for sports. That is at least partially dependent on one's physical build. Creative arts, on the other hand, are dependent on what goes on inside the skull of the artist.
I still have the very first story I ever wrote. I dictated it to my mother when I was five. She typed it out for me, and left big spaces for me to draw the pictures to go with it. Then she laminated the pages and pinned them together with shiny brass brads. Every now and then, when plumbing the Depths of My Most Archaic Papers, I come across that first story, and reread it. It's both painful and pleasurable. Pleasurable, because hey, this is what started it all! Painful, because it's pretty darn obvious that was my first story.
Note the heavy involvement of my mother in this. Mom (an elementary school teacher) taught me to read so early I can't remember not knowing how. She and my dad were and are bibliophiles, the sort of people who read for pleasure. I was also raised by a family of storytellers. When my family gets together, we cook a big meal, then sit around the dinner table for hours afterward telling and retelling stories. So one could say I was primed by my parents to be interested in books, and given highly-informal training by my entire extended family on How To Tell A Story.
When I started school, then, I was a nascent bookworm with a first fiction story under my belt. I think that was the root of my "talent". When asked to write a story by a teacher, I could draw from what I had picked up from books and my family's talkative get-togethers. I was further along the learning curve than some of my classmates, so to the teacher I appeared to have a talent for writing. If you tell a kid she's a good writer, she's likely to write more, in the hopes of winning more approval. Thus the self-sustaining cycle gets started.
I've been writing fiction, off and on, ever since that first story at age five. I still have some of the stuff I've produced over the years, and I've reread it as an adult. What's most interesting about it is that I see many of the same mistakes I've made in the past repeated in other people's work. Based on that highly-unscientific observation, I've concluded that there's no mysterious innate ability to write that I have and other people don't. I've simply had more practice at it.
I've got a real-life example to back up my assertion. When I was in fifth grade, I joined the school band. I played trombone. For years, I sort of limped along. I was utterly flabbergasted when Mr. Tipkemper, the junior high band director, picked me to join the jazz band. I still have my official jazz band shirt--it was one of my most treasured possessions for several years. After some ups and downs involving Dad getting transferred, I landed in a high school band program that bred fanatical devotion and trained very good musicians. Those were the years I practiced, hard. It paid off in my getting a seat in the top concert band of the three. Now, the guys who sat first chair were good. Really good. One of them was called "talented", and he really could play well. I don't know how much or if he practiced at all. The point, however, was that I could very nearly keep up with him. I didn't have talent--I don't have perfect pitch and I still have problems with sight-reading and sixteenth notes--but I got to be a fairly good trombone player. I probably could have majored in music at college, if I'd been interested in dealing with the theory classes.
Think about it, y'all. Artists, how many sketchbooks have you filled? I've got a file box of old letters I wrote, stories at various stages of completion, the "free verse" I slipped into as a teenager. A substantial chunk of my hard drive is devoted to bits and pieces of stories at various stages of completion. All of you out there who look at someone else's work and say, "I'll never be that good", take heart! There is no wall called "Talent" blocking your way up the learning curve.
All of that said, I think there is something that makes it a lot harder for people to learn the creative arts. For some reason, there is a lurking idea (at least in US culture) that one should not enroll in a drawing class, or a writing class, unless one is already fairly good at it, or "talented". Think about that for a moment. Does it make any sense to say, "Oh, I'd like to learn to speak Japanese, but I'm no good at it right now, so I'm not going to make a fool of myself and take a class in it"? No--but substitute "draw" or "write stories" for "speak Japanese", and all of a sudden the sentence becomes plausible. You might have heard your friends say something akin to it, or even have said it yourself. Why? In most educational endeavors, the beginning student is expected to bring only a willingness to learn. But the arts--for some reason there is a common expectation on the part of both teacher and student that the student will begin the class halfway through the syllabus, so to speak. It's not a universal expectation, I've found an exception to the rule here and there, but nine times out of ten, you'll bump into this attitude. Which means that budding artists and writers give up too early. They make a few tries, but when the results aren't what they'd hoped for, and there's no more-experienced artist on hand to explain what they need to do to do better next time, the rookies get frustrated and give up. It's at that starting stage that people most need guidance and encouragement--and most don't get it. I did, and because I was five I wasn't fazed by the fact that my first effort wasn't of professional quality. I would guess artists are the same way--catch a kid young enough, and start her climbing the learning curve before she gets self-conscious enough to notice that her drawings aren't comparable to Leonardo's work, and by the time said youngster is old enough to compare her work to that of others, she's climbed far enough that people are telling her she's "talented".
That self-consciousness, the embarrassment of being less skilled than someone else, can be shrunk and put in its place. The key to it, in my experience, is to learn to enjoy the fact that to be human is to be occasionally ridiculous. Most of the time, I'm a reasonably competent adult, capable of handling any number of situations that pop up in my life. Then again, every now and then, I make an utter fool of myself. Like being the one who marches off to the right while the rest of the band goes to the left. Or discovering that I've just spent three hours running errands...wearing a pair of pants with a big hole in the rear end. There are two ways to react to that kind of thing. One is to be mortified. The other is to have a good laugh at yourself.
Another obstacle facing the person wishing to become a writer is the fact that most writing classes are more of a hindrance than a help. I don't know whether the same syndrome affects art classes, but of all the writing classes I've taken, only one ever offered any instruction in the actual craft of writing a good story. There are established conventions and techniques in fiction writing, and they can be laid out in reasonably plain language and demonstrated to students. The conventions and standard tricks of the trade exist for a very good reason--readers respond to them.
Take, for example, the FMA character named Colonel Roy Mustang. A writer can use just his name to set the mood for a scene. If he meets a woman who greets him as "Colonel", it lends a certain formality to the dialogue that follows. If the colonel meets a woman who greets him as "Roy", it creates a more casual atmosphere. The same trick can be used to mark changes in a character's current mindset. It's a relatively minor bit of storycraft, but it's the sort of thing that a beginning writer should be taught.
Instead, so-called "writing classes" seem designed to enhance the difficulty of learning to write the sort of story other people would want to read. I started college as a Creative Writing major, and changed my major in disgust after discovering that the profs who were supposed to be teaching writing technique were hell-bent on teaching students everything but the fundamentals. My freshman year writing professor was a leftover beatnik who just couldn't believe anyone would actually want to write a story in third-person or the past tense. His idea of teaching was to tell the class, over and over, about the "author" who wrote random words on a pack of cards, then shuffled them up. The reader was to shuffle the pack, then read the words on the cards as they came up. Excuse me? Sorry, that's not writing. I could call it many things, but it's not fiction writing.
...So that's what I have to say on the concept of talent. Next: Some of my tips and tricks, in whatever order they pop to mind.