Art and Craft

Are great writers made or born?

Is writing craft or art? If you don’t have it, can you ever find it?

I recently read a book called Talent is Overrated. It makes a very convincing and well-researched case that exceptional achievement is due more to repeated, well-structured, and mindful practice than to any inborn talent. It even questions what talent is and whether it really exists and whether what we call “creativity” is actually the result of advanced knowledge of a specific field.

The book makes sense on many levels. In the worlds of sports, business, or chess, deliberate practice is key, and talent gets a small sliver of credit compared to the sustained hard work that shapes a champion. Even in the world of writing, which we consider a Divine gift that some people just have and others just don’t, the truth is that craft — the learnable part of the work — is more than half of the reason for a successful piece. But questioning whether creativity exists, or whether there really can be an inborn aptitude to hear or see things that no one else perceives quite that way, seems to stretch the thesis a bit too far.

Years ago, when I taught creative writing to eighth-graders, I tried an exercise that my own ninth-grade teacher had brought to the classroom. She played a few selections of music to the class and told us to let the music paint a scene in our minds. It could be a military parade, a jungle, a playground, a battlefield… all we had to do was listen and let the music do its work. Then, after we’d had time to think, she asked us to pick the scene that seemed most vivid and write it up as a short piece.