Great Writers

Like many English scholars, I came to college with aspirations to one day be a great author. I wanted to write a book that would change lives and echo through the corridors of eternity. To that end, I took quite a few classes on writing. In a sense, the classes were fairly ridiculous. Many of the teachers, who themselves were not great writers, promised that they could teach us gullible students to do the very thing that eluded them. Being a gullible student (not to mention being blind with desire for greatness), I took this promise at face value and put my nose to the proverbial grindstone.

For years, I worked and worked on my writing. I created countless pages, and tossed most of them in the trash. I experienced frustration so often that I could describe it like a familiar friend. While I could occasionally create a piece of work that was enjoyable to read, I just couldn't forge that huge, life-changing tale which sucked everyone in like a maelstrom.

Now that I've been out of college for nearly a decade, I've got a bit more perspective on what constitutes a great writer.

Here is what I can tell you for certain.

With the proper tutelage, a really poor writer can become a competent technical writer. Clean up his grammar, police his bad habits, and imbue him with some sense of working style, and even a poor writer will be able to communicate effectively. In essence, this is what all the writing teachers at the University of Florida did when I came through. It could be likened to teaching a basic shop class. These were the guys that made sure that you had all the tools to take on a project.

Actually doing the project, that was something else entirely.

That brings me to the second part of my theory. No amount of teaching can turn a competent writer into a great writer. I believe this because I have never seen it happen. The UF English Department, over the course of four years, turned me and a legion of other literature lovers into competent writers. That is all. Despite a wide array of teaching tactics and a veritable sea of dedication, the teachers there could only forge competence.

Please don't think that this makes the accomplishment any less important or remarkable. Imagine all the horror if a legion of teenagers just started producing whatever they wanted, with no one to tell them how or why it might suck. Were it not for the stalwart defenders of composition at liberal arts colleges, we would all be hip-deep in "inasmuch" and "heretofore".

Quoth Kurtz, "The horror! The horror!"

In the course of my life, I have been fortunate enough to meet two really great writers. In one case, I had the pleasure of meeting him well before he had received any formal instruction. Even then, anyone could see that there was something in his mind that made him different.

This was not the result of any sort of tutelage. Nothing that my friend learned in a class made him great. It was something hard to define... something he was born with.

To put it plainly, both of the great writers I know are freaks. Their minds do not work like other peoples', and they often have an extremely difficult time fitting in with the rest of society. Gifts such as theirs come with a price. Genius always does. I suspect that even the great writers who sail over a sea of adoring fans with their boatloads of money must live a terribly isolated, often frustrating existence. (Of course, I am speaking in painfully broad terms. I am not suggesting that all great authors hide behind a curtain when company comes over. I just think that they have to endure being permanently on a slightly different wavelength than the rest of humanity.)

In the case of the two greats I know, I got to ask them both how they went about creating the mind-boggling things that they did. Quite surprisingly, both of them admitted to being just as ignorant to the miracle as the rest of us. To distill two long, tortured explanations into a poor paraphrasing, they both said something like this:

"I have no fucking idea why I can do what I do. Sadly, I don't have any control over it. Sometimes it is there. Sometimes it isn't."

Perhaps it is easier for those like myself, who have never "spun straw into gold", so to speak. At least I am not surprised or disappointed when the straw remains straw. Not true for the greats. They have had that sublime experience where the straw glittered and transformed into something else entirely as their frenzied feet worked the pedals. It must be frustrating as hell when that straw stays dull and straw-colored.

Lest I be burned by a mob of angry English teachers, let me qualify what I am saying here. Great writers can still reap enormous benefit from good technical tutelage. Even if you have miracles exploding in your mind and onto the paper, the most patient reader gets grouchy after the fifteenth passive verb in a row.

In a way, though, that is what makes the greatness so mysterious and elusive. Off the top of my head, I can name at least a dozen great writers who are, in a technical sense, terrible writers. Case in point: J.R.R. Tolkien. While the man had a few marvelous turns of phrase, his dialogue was horrific and his paragraph organization was the sort of thing that Strunk and White had nightmares about. The narrative flow of his books could be likened to a drain unclogging. Regardless, people have been falling off the cliff and into his massive world for over half a century now. If you doubt the power of that particular narrative, go ahead and look at how much money the movies made.

That is what makes great writing so hard (perhaps impossible) to teach. While great writing isn't all about content, it is mostly about content. In a sense, good technique just plucks the burrs from a story and makes it form clearer. Think of it like a guitar getting finely tuned.

Good technique is not a substitute for telling a good story in the first place.

Where does this leave me? Am I to wring my hands in anguish and rail against the cruel hand that fate has dealt me?

Of course not. That is ridiculous. At 5'9", I'm not a great basketball player, either. In writing and on the court, I have learned to live with it. I've no desire to lead a cultural revolution or get rich with my words these days. On a basic level, I simply enjoy the process of writing. Let the end result be damned. I like putting on music and feeling the staccato pounding on the keyboard as my fingers play their own bizarre tune.

For a lowly norm like me, that is more than enough.