Forget About “Endowment”!
Posted by Essay Help on October 11, 2009How is a writer to access her deepest and most powerful wells of creativity? How do we dab into our endowment, our genius, our greatest potential for achiever? Writing classes often tell us how to plot, or artifact, or build characters, or create poetic images, but the question of accessing our excellence is a slippery and elusive one. It is possible we’ll need to go outside our accustomed sources to find an answer.
Many will merely have “be born with endowment,” coldly suggesting that writers are “born” with a particular amount of potential, and that one either has this or not. And you know? Thither is a certain amount of actuality to this. It is hard to argue with the idea that geniuses like Mozart or Shakespeare were gifted. But the nature versus nurture argument is both fascinating and, for the average person, irrelevant. After all, since we can’t go back and choose our grandparents, what are we to do? Just abandon our dreams of excellence if we don’t happen to be one of the gifted few?
I often have something to students that is both deadly capital and a discourtesy (and deliberate) exaggeration. It is this “I don’t believe in endowment. Every time I’ve ever gotten close to an excellent performer in any discipline, all I’ve seen is a lifetime of hard, honest activity.”
Why would I have something like this? Because it is the artifact I truly feel. The fact is that I’ve seen endless people fail due to lack of honest activity. And given those years or decades of activity, I’ve seen few fail for lack of endowment.
The actuality is that if “talent” exists, it seems to be the capacity for long, concentrated periods of tunnel-vision focus, combined with a single capacity for digging into themselves to find truths most of us are reluctant to reveal. These phenomenal men and women sacrifice outside interests, relationships, and sometimes their health and saneness to focus on their divine obsession. And yes, if you find a group of these people, any will rise higher than others. But the primary gift of art is to be able to drop your life in the act of creation. And to do that, you don’t need to be “the best” (whatsoever THAT means). All you need to do is to get into the apical fifth in your field, and you’ll do just fine.
And that is achievable with focus and honesty. But what exactly do I mean by that?
FOCUS
1) Can you compose 500 words a day for bill years?
2) Can you concentrate for an hour at a time without fastener for coffee, phone calls, or bathroom breaks?
3) Can you exclude the voices of doubt and failure? So you have a chance. In my own life, writing was simply my only career goal. I would rather have failed as a writer than succeeded at anything else. I was choice to do ANYTHING ethical and healthy to reach that goal, and every single day I asked myself new questions about how I could do it, who I could ask, what I could read, what classes I might attend. Willingness to postpone gratification is essential, because your efforts simply won’t pay off rapidly unless you are in that incredibly lucky fraction of a percent. And thither is good news: even if you believe in “talent,” in the real class, an absolutely driven “B” or “C” educatee will outperform a lazy “A” educatee almost every time.
HONESTY. This is where the rubber meets the road, the diamond path to excellence.
1) What is your actual current ability level? What is the ability level necessary to make it in your chosen field? Make no mistake: writing is one of the most competitive fields in the class. EVERYONE thinks they can compose, and to a degree, they are correct. If you’re going to make your mark, you will have to bring everything you’ve got.
2) Who has the resources you need to bridge the gap between your current and desired ability levels? Remember that they have probably exhausted a lifetime gathering their knowledge. What can you offer them (that is ethical and healthy for you) to gain their help and activity?
3) What do you fear most? Love most? What angers you most? Makes you laugh? Your ability to create memorable characters will be based on the depths of your self-understanding, and capacity to accurately observe the human condition. If you can dig deeply enough, you’ll find an incredible riches of content, more than enough to last a lifetime. But you must be honest. When writing to affect an emotion in your audience, first compose to induction that feeling in yourself. Compose for yourself, or for an audience you respect.
4) What is your best effort? Thither is a great environment in “Walk The Line” where a music producer tells Johnny Cash to imagine he is dying in the street. He has one last song to sing to sum up the aggregate of his existence. What would that song be? Questions like this cut finished the b.s. Don’t attempt to be clever. Just tell the actuality.
5) What do you actually believe human beings are? At the core of us, low all of the ugly and pretty. What are we? How do you explain the differences and conflicts between human beings: black and achromatic, gay and aboveboard, male and female. What do you believe love is? What causes action? Why do we dream? Your own single answers to these questions will point you toward your personal “voice.”
6) What is the nature of the collection? Of God? Is thither anything out thither? Are we alone? Piece it is possible to compose stories and screenplays from a difference of philosophical positions, the writer who knows herself and has a position on the nature of life will outperform a “brilliant” writer who has nothing to have. Dig deep.
These cardinal aspects, (1) hard activity, and (2) honesty, will keep you busy for a lifetime, and accept you to the real edge of your potential as a writer. And after all, if you haven’t old up all the potential you were given at birth, it hardly makes meaning to complain that you didn’t get more!
Tags: advice, creativity, novel, writing