Yesterday, I posted an entry about how writing well takes time.
I’ve been very fortunate to be friends with writers, artists, and musicians.
One of my musician friends is somebody I’ve known for over 25 years. In that time, I’ve seen him play bass, piano, and guitar.
Yesterday on his Facebook page, he posted this video, along with a humorous line about how frustrating it is to see somebody so young and so talented, while he struggles with working long hours and finding time to practice guitar.
(I feel his pain when I see what a lot of 10 – 15-year-olds are doing with juggling these days.)
It hit me while watching this video and reading what my friend said that writing doesn’t have the equivalent of this.
While we’ve all seen countless news stories about musical “prodigies,” I’ve never seen a 10 – 15-year old writer who is the writing equivalent of incredibly talented and practiced young musicians, and even some artists.
Now, don’t think for a moment that I think music and art is easier than writing — I’ve tried art and music and settled on writing because it was easier for me. To do anything well takes time.
I do, however, think it’s easier to train a kid how to paint a certain way, play a musical piece over and over, or juggle well than it is to teach a kid to write with the same level of skill as the young guitarist above.
Trust me: I was a much more impressive juggler at 18 than I was a writer.
I think one of the things that sets writing apart from other arts is the life experience that’s necessary to do it well.
You can teach a kid how to juggle. You can teach them the basic three-ball cascade and then build on that to other tricks. Same thing with music, and technically decent art.
But to write well, one needs to have lived. Even talented young writers sound inexperienced or like parrots. It’s easy to tell that while they may have talent, they have only lived a life that primarily consists of school and kid things.
Sometimes, as hard as it can be to put the loooooooooong hours into living and writing well, I’m glad that the life one needs to live and time spent to write well separates those who can from those who cannot.
Experience is a great teacher. Not just from life lessons and knowledge of being able to write many different subjects, voices, moods, and whatever else… but the technical art of stringing letters and words together to truly paint a picture.
Any talented (or just interested!) kids should definitely keep writing, but I do see what you mean. There is just something about the experience of living life itself and not just the experience of the art of writing that is impressive. Your writing — and I loved your writing when I first saw it — has really grown in leaps and bounds. You’ve definitely seen and experienced a LOT more since then and it shows.
Thanks, Cynthia. When I look back at some of my older writing, I still like it, but you can tell than I was 20 when I wrote it.
I think you hit on exactly what I am trying to say with this post when you talk about different subjects, voices, and moods and being able to string that all together.
When I was a younger writer, I tried striving for that because I grew up reading writers like John Irving. I knew I wasn’t experienced enough to pull that off, though. The couple times I tried, I could see how horrible it was and destroyed all that writing that sounded like me trying to be somebody else.
With juggling, though, I could see the best trick ever, go into the backyard and practice it hundreds or thousands of times, and get it down inside a couple days in most cases. Granted, I became a better juggler over time, but at any given time after a year or so of juggling, if I put my mind to pulling off what the best jugglers out there were doing, I could do it.
But with writing, it was much harder because it’s not simply about practice, but living and experiencing things.
I think things like music and juggling — two things I love in ways even more than writing — allow people a specific thing to shoot for. To pull off a juggling trick, you do what almost everybody else who learned it did, in much the same manner. When a musician learns a new song, they play the same notes others play to get there before putting their spin on the piece.
Writing is more subjective, though. You can’t say, “Play these notes exactly like this, or throw juggling balls in this pattern exactly like this,” and that’s that to getting there. Writing isn’t as specific in the way to get there.
And yes, I agree: any kid (or adult) should write. Maybe they shouldn’t be published, but I believe everybody should write, if only for themselves. (And if they do it long enough and push seriously push themselves, they’ll definitely reach a day when they can hold their own and be published.)
I agree with the fact that one needs to have lived, in order to write well. Writing well requires emotion. Sometimes a lot of emotion. When we’re young, we don’t understand our emotions. Often we don’t even know what they are. To teach emotion is futile. So yes, we live, we experience a cascade of emotions, we learn about them and their effect on us, and then we can learn how to express them on paper.
Thanks for the reply, Evelyn.
“To teach emotion is futile.”
I like that.
I think when we hear a 10-year-old violinist who plays Haydn very well, we’re impressed. But even with musicians, a 55-year-old, skilled violinist who has years of life experience will play the Haydn piece with more emotion.
With writing, the differences seem more apparent to me. And that got me thinking about how writing differs from many arts when it comes to its lack of “prodigies.”
Any serious story I wrote when I was 15 – my early 20s sounded very forced. I recognized that, and fortunately stopped and focused on stories relying more on structure than deeper elements.
The novel I’m working on now was something I started when I wasn’t as experienced, and I knew to work on more than just ideas and bits and pieces would result in the story not being as good as it’s becoming now that I’m 40 and have experienced so much more than when I was 20.
I think people can be taught writing basics…enough to put together something that allows them to express themselves. But you’re right, we can’t teach emotion…it’s something that comes with experience, and, I’m sure, it’s one of the reasons writers tend to break in later in life than many other professions.