In my mind there is no gift--there is a considerable amount of labor, but I don't have much interest in talking about talent. There are a lot of talented niggers on the corner, in jail, under early tombstones. That's what my mother used to say.I agree there's no question that talent is no guarantor of success or even survival. But I think about writing, about how to teach it, about how to get better at it, and about the imperative to do it, I think you have a much more interesting conversation if you talk about the interaction between talent and labor. And I think that's true of art in general.
My experience has been, as Daniel Strauss says, that people become artists, or in the case of journalists, artisans (I wish that term hadn't fallen into disuse. It lends a level of precision to the space between the novel and the corporate report.) because they can't stop doing whatever it is they love: write, paint, sing, compose, act, etc. And I think that inability to stop comes from a match between talent and desire. I write much better than I draw, paint or collage, despite the classes I've taken in the latter disciplines, and I keep writing because it's the way I'm best capable of expressing the ideas and capturing some of the beauty I was, um, less than capable of capturing through art.
Something in me means that I'm not capable of getting beyond luridly-shaded caricatures of St. Basil's cathedral, or women with leaves on their heads (not a lot of visual imagination, sadly) when I draw or paint, but I can write a killer kicker line on a piece about teenaged comic book characters. And I keep doing writing because there have been moments in my life--senior year of high school, most of 2005, and the last five months, when I've felt like I have suddenly understood certain things about writing with an intense sharpness. In between, there have been vast, frustrating plateaus, and there have certainly been times when I thought about quitting, or when I didn't know that what I was headed towards was a career in writing at all. Ray Bradbury describes the kind of moment I'm talking about (although his revelations, and his results happen on a level I can't even imagine inhabiting) in Zen in the Art of Writing:
All during my twentieth and twenty-first years, I circled around summer noons and October midnights, sensing that there somewhere in the bright and dark seasons must be something that was really me. I finally found it one afternoon when I was twenty-two years old. I wrote the title "The Lake" on the first page of a story that finished itself two hours later. Two hours after that I was sitting at my typewriter out on a porch in the sun with tears running off the tip of my nose, and the hair on my neck standing up. Why the arousal of hair and the dripping nose? I realized I had at last written a really fine story. The first, in ten years of writing. And not only was it a fine story, but it was some sort of hybrid, something verging on the new.Anne Lamott says in Bird By Bird that perfectionism "will keep you cramped and insane your whole life...I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping stone just right, you won't have to die." She's absolutely right that the fear of not doing something exactly right can be crippling--I don't think Ta-Nehisi has to learn French before going to Paris. But I think that working really hard, that striving for the moment when you create something that satisfies you utterly is important, because in those instants when your hard work results in the highest expression of your talent, you find out who you are.
Bradbury is a huge fan of this poem, by Gerard Manley Hopkins, as am I:
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves - goes itself, myself it speaks and spells,
Crying "What I do is me: for that I came."
I say more, the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is -
Christ - for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.
I think that's about as good and concise a push to go big or go home on what you love, and what you get satisfaction from as you can find.
Something that's been amazing for me over the past seven or eight years is watching my friend Kat Harris become the musical theater artist she is today. We've lived in the same neighborhood since sixth grade, and we've been friends long enough that we knew each other when neither of us had an clue what we were good at, or what we wanted to do. She remembers me when I knew basically nothing about popular music, or movies, or how to find a seat in a middle-school cafeteria, and I remember her when she was seriously into Metallica, and was, like me, a debater. And somewhere in college, musical theater just clicked for Kat. I remember with startling clarity the way loving theater illuminated her, and how hard she worked to get into the Musical Theater Writing program at Tisch, and how hard she worked once she was in the program. But all that work wouldnt' have gotten her anywhere if she hadn't had an eye for subject matter and an ear for words. Her work is beginning to be performed, and singers are reaching out to her for pieces. I'm excited by the prospect of other people getting to experience her work, but I'm also excited by the constant sight of Kat become who she is through her art.