Components of a Certain Kind Make a Writer a Writer
A Monte Python skit tells the story of an accountant who was dissatisfied with accounting because he felt it was so boring. He went to a service that analyzed an individual’s personality and capabilities and advised the person on the occupation that would best suit them. The tests revealed that he was a very boring person, which made him perfect for the accountant’s job. The skit gets a laugh, but also illustrates the fact that certain personal characteristics do equip people to perform well in a pursuit.
A number of components come into alignment to result in the direction of a person’s life and career. The components making a social worker are different from the components that work together to make a diplomat or a baker. Why do you happen to be a writer and not an acrobat or botanist? You didn’t become the writer you are willy-nilly. There are reasons. Why were Picasso and Monet painters and not novelists?
Buddhism sets up qualities a life must have if the person is to find fulfillment. One quality is “Right Livelihood:” To be most fulfilled the person must be in the occupation that most suits them and is most beneficial to them. My wife and I have four children. Each is very different than the others but is perfect for their occupation. The analytical one who loves mathematics is the director of revenue for a city. The organized one manages a number of people. The one who wants to help people is a therapist. The most sociable one is a real estate agent helping people find the home they will be most happy in.
You’re a writer because you have components of a certain type—an unusual type—of many personal qualities, interests, motivations, values, attitudes, abilities, experiences, and other elements equipping you specifically for the writer’s life, which I needn’t tell you is anything but an ordinary, typical, or easy life.
All necessary components have to be present if you are to excel at the writer’s craft. If just one component is missing, you no longer have an ideal writer. If you are to succeed in an art there must be a fit between the talent you possess and the talent necessary to participate with distinction in the art.
The existence of serious writers is atypical. Most people do not live a serious writer’s life. They do not keep artist’s work hours. They are not absorbed in words, paragraphs, style, and sentences. They are not concerned with publishers’ deadlines. They do not worry about the rhythms of sentences, their music. Their training is different. Their friends are different, as are their ambitions and dreams. They are not so self absorbed as writers are. Writers’ lives are like other writers’ lives.
Ernest Hemingway—quite probably the most innovative stylist of all–had all the components. William Faulkner had them all. Shakespeare had them all, and Marcel Proust, Eugene O’Neill, Virginia Woolf, and Joseph Conrad and James Joyce and centuries before them Sophocles and Euripides. No component was missing. Stephen King, Joan Didion, and John Grisham have them. People who win Nobel Prizes have them. Do you have them?
Louise Nevelson said: “My theory is that when we come on this earth, many of us are ready-made…Some of us–most of us–have genes that are ready for certain performances. Nature gives you these gifts.”
Needed Writers’ Skills
Writers and other artists should be able to recall many thousands of detailed memories that form a basis of their writings–a gift to recall sensations and experiences from many years earlier and to reconstruct them in their original freshness and vividness.
A seventy-five year old writer may describe the expression on her mother’s face at her fourth birthday party. And if a photograph of that face that day were held up it would be identical to the skilled writer’s written description.
If you don’t have the writer’s components and wish to excel as a writer you’ll have to acquire them–if you can. For example, having a rich imagination, being comfortable working in solitude, and being inquisitive are qualities that writers should possess. (If writers cannot be productive working alone for long periods they will have problems.)
But not everyone who wishes to be a writer is able to easily acquire all the components. For example, to be considered a good writer, a writer must possess a range of identifiable technical capabilities such as the ability to create an effective dramatic scene.
Good writers can do that, but not all writers can, even some writers who work very hard trying to learn how to. Think of any writer’s skill–some people will master it easily, some only with great difficulty, and some will never master it. Whatever they do, some writers’ scenes are not effective.
They become known as novelists or short story writers who though perhaps superlative in other respects, write scenes that are flat. Some writers are masters of the sentence. Their sentences seem to pop out of the text and startle you with their beauty. Thomas Wolfe could not handle the plots of his novels but wrote wonderful episodes.
Or the writer’s descriptions of characters and landscapes are always poor because they have no facility for creating images, metaphors, and similes although a good writer should have an “eye” and know how to write vivid descriptions that enliven the text and appeal to readers’ senses. Some writers must struggle to create a single image while others–painters in words–are able to pull five good ones out of the air at will. They are asked, “How are you able to do so easily what is so difficult for me?” It is a gift.
A writer should have an insatiable passion to write and the skill of persistence. Joyce Carol Oates is a prolific author of fifty-eight novels for a reason. She has good writing practices, and finds no reason why one who professes to be a writer shouldn’t be writing all the time. She says, “When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.”
© 2021 David J. Rogers
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