Tuesday – and the day has started badly. For a start I have to go to work which means that hopes for a holiday lottery win have proved to be somewhat optimistic. It also occurs to me that the one thing that I purport to want to do, namely writing, is being relegated in the face of this new blogging distraction. It is all part of Tartarus, I guess. All part of the reason that I’m in this metaphorical (or should that be metaphysical?) realm.
Today I was musing over the subject of creativity. Is it innate or can it be taught? I once believed that you could be taught anything or even teach yourself with the right instruction manual (Juggling for the Complete Klutz was a particular favourite). As if to prove a point, I once taught myself to draw. Learning to draw is an interesting pursuit. The popular assertion is that people can either draw or they can’t; that some are born with this ability.
Although it may be true that some people are faster on the uptake than others, I thought at the time that it was all a matter of application. You see, if you give someone a pencil and some paper, a person who has not even considered drawing since primary or high school, a person who has never really tried to draw, and ask them to draw a face, most of them will say they can’t and, when pressed, will produce something that looks not unlike a drawing that a primary school child might construct. They use this scrawl as evidence that they can’t draw. However, I would contend, this was just evidence that they hadn’t spent enough time drawing. If they put the hours in and consulted some books they could indeed get to a point that they could draw something more than passable. I put this to the test and taught myself. At some point people around me started saying, when they saw what I was doing, that I was indeed able to draw, they said that they wished that they had my abilities. I even sold a picture. But was this innate talent or just the result of practice? I have no way of telling. I can't draw now. I stopped drawing and now it is no longer something that I do or can do. I find this strange.
But why go on about drawing? What has this to do with anything important? Well there is an interesting comparison with writing. If you speak to someone who has decided, like myself, that they would like to be a writer you do not get any of that daunted reticence you get with drawing. They never question the fact that they can write, that they have the ability.
I think that this is largely due to a confusion in terms. The verb ‘To Write’ is used to imply different tasks. We can all write, in the sense that we left school with a grasp of grammar and construction and a vocabulary sufficiently large to allow us to get by in life. The physical task of writing presents no challenge. The trouble is that people confuse this meaning of the verb with another meaning which is about creative construction. This latter meaning has only a passing association with the physical production of words on screen or page; is only loosely tied to grammatical construction. But we use the same verb so people believe they can write, when in fact they can do little more than scribe – their efforts are no more advanced than that first attempt to draw a face. The difference is that it is easy for someone to see how bad their first drawing is (and this is the main reason that they give up so quickly) but they are seemingly blind to the quality of their writing.
So on that evidence I should be confident that with some work and concentrated effort I should be able to learn to produce creative writing, I just need to accept that, like drawing, it will take time. But I have grown to doubt this. I have started to believe that there may be a very real, physical barrier to creativity and its written expression. What if creativity is actually a manifestation of the way in which our brains are configured? Then, perhaps, there is nothing to learn. No hope of learning. At least not from a creative perspective. My drawing was never art, and I doubt it would have attained that status. Is this also the inevitable conclusion that I will reach with my prose? Will I ever find a way out of Tartarus Central?
1 comment:
I am convinced that the evidence of an innate ability to do anything is whether or not we can do it at any time or only when inspired. I think practice provides addendums to in-born abilities to do anything. Addendums that lead to customization of color when painting and customization of thought when writing, but at the root of any of these efforts, is inspiration. I have written things when not inspired and when reading them later found this lack of soul very evident even though the thought and the plot was interesting and imaginative.
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