Marc Laidlaw recently shared a link on Facebook to a post on “Good Writing vs. Talented Writing”over on Brainpickings featuring some ideas by Samuel Delany. Essentially, Delany draws a line between “good writing” and superior “talented writing”:
The talented writer often uses specifics and avoids generalities — generalities that his or her specifics suggest. Because they are suggested, rather than stated, they may register with the reader far more forcefully than if they were articulated. Using specifics to imply generalities — whether they are general emotions we all know or ideas we have all vaguely sensed —is dramatic writing. A trickier proposition that takes just as much talent requires the writer carefully to arrange generalities for a page or five pages, followed by a specific that makes the generalities open up and take on new resonance. … Indeed, it might be called the opposite of “dramatic” writing, but it can be just as strong — if not, sometimes, stronger.
As I noted on Facebook myself,
Also, one reason the Clarion workshops stopped inviting Delany to teach, IIRC. This message runs counter to the conception of becoming a writer central to the business of Creative Writing programs, workshops, etc.
And in the comments, I added:
Note, he does teach at Clarion Workshops these days (he’s teaching in San Diego this year, in fact), but I’d be very curious to know whether he talks about such things while there. I’ve heard in the old days, he would actually go around the room, saying to each writer whether he thought they would “make it” or not. Which, well… I can think of cases where such a thing might be a mercy, but as a general practice, I dunno. Certainly it was mentioned in the context of why he hadn’t taught a Clarion workshop in a while, at the time I heard the story.
The “more” than I alluded to, as in more thoughts, are as follows:
I’m not sure what I think of Delany’s ideas as presented in that post. I suspect there is something to it, though. Most people agree that excellent writing (or other creative work) is 5% inspiration (talent, etc.) and 95% perspiration. But most people seem to say this and then want to talk about the 95%, and leave the 5% alone. Because, of course, it would seem apparent that writing programs can do nothing to address that.
Hmmm. Then again, I also think that there’s a certain tendency among some creatives to say these kinds of discouraging things as a way of romanticizing their own work and their identities as creators. They may not be wrong… but they may be emphasizing it for reasons other than describing how human creativity works.
What I’ve read about creativity (I did what research I could on the subject a few summers ago, while working on an academic paper), though, suggests that the difference between great artists and the rest of the population seems to boil down to quantitative differences in motivation, rather than qualitative differences in thought processes… that so-called geniuses in one or another creative field are not (a) more genius in all fields, and (b) are not performing their acts of genius by performing qualitatively different sorts of mental processes. They’re doing what we all do in problem solving, they’re just way more interested in the ride, and explore different solutions to problems that most of us are happy to solve in the quickest, easiest way possible.
But that leaves open the question why so many of the greatest jazz musicians were so eccentric, as driven home by a truly hilarious blindfold test with Thelonious Monk I read earlier this week. (I found the link over at Ethan Iverson’s wonderful jazz blog Do the Math.) The anecdotes about Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Charlie Mingus, Ornette Coleman… and that’s to say nothing of people like Sun Ra and Albert Ayler. So many of the foundational, Grandmaster-level jazz musicians were really, really odd people, in ways that were immediately apparent in interaction off the bandstand. Wonderful people, too, some of them… but so many were ever so slightly (or ever so much) odd, by the terms of mainstream culture in their time, and arguably by the standards of our time, too.
Still, I can’t help but wonder if part of the hostility towards arts education–on the part of plenty of people who still show up to teach workshops–isn’t in part a reaction to having depended on educational work as a day job at one point or another… a resentment of their complicity with the system. Delany was a creative writing instructor for decades, so he obviously believes that writing can (and should) to some degree be taught. Is he talking about the students who excelled in his classes? Or the ones who had failed to excel by the end of those classes?
I suppose it would help to read the essay the pull-quote was taken from. If only I had a copy of the book… or, rather, if only I didn’t have a ton of other books already paid-for and loaded on my Kindle (and some paperbacks of actual novels by Delany, too) waiting to be read.
But at the moment? I’m still digging my way through Defoe’s Moll Flanders…
“About Writing” is a great book – it’s not so much that you have to agree with it, but you have to wrestle with it.
“Moll Flanders” is also great. I totally had a book-crush on her. God bless, her mercenary soul.
Thanks Justin! I will check it out, though it may take some time. So many books, including one you mentioned recently — Mamatas’ Bullet Time — queued up first, but I’ll get to it eventually.
Ha, Moll Flanders. I’m still only like 11-12% in, sez the Kindle. It’s funny reading the novel after learning so much about the (somewhat mercenary himself) author. I’ll spew my own impressions blogwards when I finish it. It’s fun so far, though a slow read for me…
I agree with Mr.
DelaneyDelany, what he says about specifics, but I wouldn’t think of it as a condition that distinguishes “good” from “better” writing… I would say it’s a basic requirement of upper-level writing in the first place. Not an option.And, well, in theory motivation and qualitative “inborn” talent are different, but can they ever be distinguished in real life? Most people like what they’re good at, do what they like so often that they become good at it, and which one comes first is a chicken-or-egg question.
Also, the thing about the “qualitative thought process” is that we’re inclined to think of geniuses as born, rather than made (even self-made). A lot of the eccentricity, the “genius” level thinking that masters have exhibited at one point or another… I think it comes from a habitual tendency to both think more intuitively and be able to set up a system in your head (music, art, mathematics, law… the practice of these fields all have their own internal governing rules of logic).
To be sure some people think like this more often than other people… and usually without anyone else’s prompting. This may be why people think that geniuses are born that way. Except, they’re not, Mozart wasn’t born knowing how to compose… he studied music theory before he was able to do that.
One possible reason for the eccentricity is that the same degree of motivation (unlike some other qualities, it may safely be said that strength of motivation is determined from birth… it has to do biologically with functioning of the dopaminergic pathways and reward centers, which is more potent in some people than others) that urges them on to pursue their subject of choice may make them dogmatic, less inclined to adjust to other people’s ways of thinking. But it’s all a gray area, isn’t it?
Anne,
I made onetiny change to your comment, correcting the spelling of Delany’s name. Hope you don’t mind.
Right, except of course, I dare you to pick up a copy of, ahem, wait, I probably shouldn’t name which pro-level SF magazine (or famous authors) I’m thinking of right now. Delany’s right, of course, but actually, if you look at the stuff being published in pro magazines, there’s a fair amount of stuff that’s “good” but not “great” by Delany’s terms. This is something SF writers I know talk about in private, not so much in public.
That’s true, though I think inborn talent does exist, and is detectable in real life. Talent being essentially this or that bit of wiring in the brain being this or that way. For example, I once knew someone who wanted to be a singer, but was–from what all of us could tell during recitals by this person–tone deaf. Like, stone, iron-block tone deaf. It was generally felt that it was unfair of the university music department he studied in accept him into their program of study. This was a case of a lack of talent being discernible.
Likewise, people who have perfect pitch, or who somehow have “good harmonic ears” — a better-than-average innate ability to hear and differentiate between different harmonic structures — have an advantage in music. Anyone who isn’t tone deaf can develop it, but not everyone who isn’t tone deaf ever gets truly great harmonic ears, and not every pro player does… but it’s possible all the truly great ones do. (Something that used to dishearten me when I was young, though I know now that I certainly didn’t work hard on it the way I should have; I’m about to invest in a book that will help train me specifically in that skill, as a matter of fact.)
Now that definitely is true, and I think someone with a tendency to set up an logical (and often an algorithmic) system in one’s mind, and then engage with it intuitively, is probably part of that. But does this suggest that the “genuises” we talk about might actually demonstrate qualitative, perhaps neurological, differences from the rest of population?
Well, there has always been a strand of thinking that suggests the genius comes from someplace primordial, transcendent, or outside the person… that it’s a “gift” in other words, and the “inborn” notion seems to sort of come from that, paradoxically. Most people fail to grasp that geniuses also work their asses off. (John Coltrane played for hours and hours every day.) They also severely ignore the social context in which people in the past did their “genius” development: Mozart wasn’t in school all day long and coming home to practice. He was studying music from a very, very early age, and studying it intensively in a way we don’t push kids to do. Doubtless he had perfect pitch, excellent harmonic ears, and astounding musical memory; I suspect maybe some of that was inborn, but I don’t know how much, and it’s possible that very intensive study in early childhood could produce someone unusual in that way. We probably won’t know in our world because the intensiveness of the study would border on child abuse in most moder societies.
I am dubious about “geniuses” being “dogmatic” in the artistic sense you mean, though plenty of highly accomplished creative types — “geniuses” are quite dogmatic types in general. The research I read suggested that usually the elevated motivation is usually focused on (a) exploring complex systems for the sake of the discovery and explanation, instead of trying to “solve” the problem set as simply and quickly possible, and (b) the motivation to achieve a particularized body of work within a given tradition. In other words, most geniuses seem driven to master complex systems by exploring them intensively, and then produce intensely personal statements that still function “within” the system to some degree. (Though how “within” their statement is might not be apparent to other people: most great jazz innovators were rejected by the preceding generation of jazz musicians, and celebrated by their contemporaries, and imitated by most of their successors.)
I do wonder, though, whether this explains the stereotype of the drunken writer and the drugged-up musician: wouldn’t the potency of reward centers and dopaminergic pathways in the brains of those “creative types” also explain why so many of them fall prey to addiction? Or ought we to be looking at sociological/psychological explanations instead? (Communities of musicians were suffused with particularly fashionable drugs; writers tend to be people who think too much and drinking helps dull the edge of that; etc.?)
I do know one author who cautioned us at a workshop that there’s a grain of truth to the stereotype that writers are prone to depression–the rejection letters, the long hours put in alone, and so on–and that we ought to be very careful with alcohol, given its ubiquity in the social side of the SF scene. (The primary place for writers to socialize at SF conventions, for example, is always in a bar, and at the workshop I’m discussion we often made trips to the local pub.)
Yeah, occasionally you have the people who are so obviously unsuited for a particular field that it props up the “inborn” theory. But I think there needs to be a distinction between not being able to cut it as a technical performer (no one’s going to ask a wheelchair-bound person to run a marathon, for example) and the kind of thinking and viewpoint that can be called “genius,” as in creative. Shin Hae-Chul was a crappy singer at first, still isn’t a very strong vocalist, but he’s a pretty good composer. And wheelchair-bound people can do marathons. Just not on their feet.
Or mayhap the marathon metaphor isn’t a good one because there’s not much theory to a marathon, it’s something you just DO. Pure technical skill. But many other fields, like music and art, involve both theory and execution, which feed into one another. And it’s possible to specialize in one side, but you can’t get good if you’re ignoring the other side.
And to come out through that to the other end of the spectrum from the marathon, writing is mostly a mental struggle, even the execution of it. You find a problem, you solve it by thinking of what to write. So I wonder if the nature of what might be called a genius differs from field to field. Also, the less technical a medium gets, the less likely its best artists are to be called “geniuses”, because talent/the lack thereof is not so nakedly visible.
I do wonder, though, whether this explains the stereotype of the drunken writer and the drugged-up musician: wouldn’t the potency of reward centers and dopaminergic pathways in the brains of those “creative types” also explain why so many of them fall prey to addiction? Or ought we to be looking at sociological/psychological explanations instead? (Communities of musicians were suffused with particularly fashionable drugs; writers tend to be people who think too much and drinking helps dull the edge of that; etc.?)
I think both need to be taken into account, both seem like good explanations.
I do know one author who cautioned us at a workshop that there’s a grain of truth to the stereotype that writers are prone to depression–the rejection letters, the long hours put in alone, and so on–and that we ought to be very careful with alcohol, given its ubiquity in the social side of the SF scene.
I like drinking parties, but I hate drinking alone, and I don’t intend to start.
That’s true… I think often that creative people are broken in some way. Of course, we all are, but creative people are often the ones who end up sort of worrying the wound, who end up feeling a need to confront it. You’re right that theory and execution both matter in a lot of creative arts… the theory informing the execution and the execution forming new theory when it stretches it beyond its former boundaries.
Hmmm. I don’t know. One thing I’m learning a lot here in this house full of writers is that everyone seems to relate to writing differently. Me, I see it in a lot of ways like how I see relating to music: SF for me has a canonical, established tradition, and when it comes to my writing (if not when I am actually writing) I consciously see myself interfacing with, riffing on, and attempting to expand the tradition, to keep pushing it forward, the way the jazz musicians I admire most constantly did. Other writers I’m among now seem not to feel so strongly about that side of things–they’re approaching it in other ways we haven’t discussed, or else that side of it is less of an emphasis for them. (Or, they talk about it less, at the very least.)
It reminds me, again, of what I wrote above: the brokenness of oneself being on some level fuel for creative artists. Which is not to fetishize it or glorify brokenness, among artists, or to mock its absence in non-creative people. It’s just a pattern I’ve noticed. (IT runs parallel to the observation a friend recently mentioned, that I’ve long held, that people who’ve led less painful, less complicated lives tend to be less interesting and often less complex themselves.)
I know what you mean about drinking alone: it’s not a good place to end up. My general approach is that I usually just don’t drink hard liquor: beer’s fine for me, wine maybe, but not hard liquor… and I tend to have no more than one beer in a day now. That makes it more like any other beverage I might choose to have while working. (I’m frankly more worried about my coffee consumption than alcohol, at this point! And that’s worth noting, too: a lot of writers I know are coffeeholics, though, strangely, none of the ones I live with now.)