In creative writing, craft is important — but it’s not everything
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about talent and craft and thinking about what is deemed “worthy” by the literary establishment. What is seen as valuable and important by the powers that be, especially in an academic setting, has much power. That power, I would argue, must be harnessed for supporting young people, and even not so young people, in their creative and literary endeavors. It is not about judgment so much as it is about lifting people up so they can be their best creative self and making sure we as teachers and facilitators do not squash creativity.
An experience comes to mind. When I was in my 20s, more than a couple of decades ago, I took an introductory creative writing class at Chaffey College. My professor marked my pages up with a red pen and said I was melodramatic. In the workshop, at least as I remember it, he called my prose borderline hysterical. This critique, if you can call it that, devastated me. I put aside my stories and poems as mere folly and didn’t write creatively for almost a decade.
Even though my professor was harsh, I blame myself for putting my writing aside. Truth is, I was young and insecure. Perhaps I didn’t have the self confidence to realize I had talent, but that I still needed to learn craft. Isn’t that what school is for?
Thinking back, I do wonder, however, if the professor’s critique was a result of his own limitations and reliances upon the literary canon. My stories he frowned upon were romantic genre fiction for a reason. You see, my mom taught me to read when I was 3. By elementary school, I was considered an
Juanita E. Mantz advanced reader, and was obsessed with my mom’s Harlequin romances novels. From a young age, I knew words like ravished and swooned. My elementary teachers were perplexed. “What a vocabulary for a young girl!” they would exclaim. Soon I was putting aside my Judy Blume books and reading works by Scott Fitzgerald. Books were always my solace and I fell into them over and over and read as much as I could.
In my youth, I dreamed of writing full time, as a reporter or a screenwriter, but chose the more practical path of law. Yet, writing would not release me and I found writing again in my 30s as a corporate lawyer, writing poems while watching the sun set in the nighttime Houston sky from my high rise office.
Back to my point, talent, which for me is synonymous for potential, is more important than craft, especially when you’re young. It’s about having something to say.
Just ask the Sex Pistols. The Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious couldn’t play bass well, but he had an identity and style and he and the lead singer Johnny Rotten had a punk rock message for the world. There is a power in the simplicity of youth and that is why a band’s best albums are usually their first ones.
Writing a good story is similar to music in that way. At times, our best pieces are our earliest ones. Like a good song, stories sometimes come out easy, like water, and while they may not be polished, they’re raw and real. Truthful writing from the heart is something created from the soul. It’s special for want of a better term. It’s about voice, and that is ingrained. You either got it or you don’t.
In my 20s, my prose was over wrought, of that I’m sure, and a bit melodramatic too I must admit. Yet, still, I know there must have been something promising in the pieces, something real. I wish I had kept those pages. Instead, they are lost to the ages.
If I could get in a time machine and go back to my 20-something self, I would tell myself, forget that teacher. He knows not what he does. Or maybe he does but it’s irrelevant to who you are as a writer. He is judging you by the cannon’s standards, a cannon made up mostly of White men. You are a romantic and dramatic and that’s okay. I would also tell my younger self this: you do not fit the mold, which means that you’ll have to make your own path. It will not always be easy, but it will be rewarding.
Because one day, you’re going to prove all the naysayers wrong.