Talent, Skill, and Education
Here’s the part that you might not want to hear, but it must be said: if your actual words-on-the-page writing is awful, you will not be successful. People might read your book, but you’ll get dragged and trolled for bad writing, and that’s not the kind of “famous” anyone really wants. Just ask Ea-nāṣir. Yes, there are people who are making money cranking out AI-generated books which are objectively just fucking atrocious, but they’re accomplishing very short-term gains by enormously shitty means. (I’ll address AI stuff next week.)
If you’re taking your career as a writer seriously, you will not stoop to such lows. You will make sure that what you churn out is solidly not made of suck.
But Isn’t “Good” and “Bad” Kind of Subjective?
Okay, you go me there. I’m going to give you a great big asterisk * to use as you see fit to acknowledge that we as artists are notoriously dreadful at judging our own work as acceptable or not. So, objectively, what do I mean by “good writing” versus “bad writing”?
Well, there are a lot of layers to that, but let’s start with the basics of how to form complete sentences and use effective punctuation. Even (Dr.) Chuck Tingle who writes books like “Buttagedon: The Final Days of Pounding Ass” and “Scary Stories To Tingle Your Lesbian Butt” is a technically good writer, as in, his use of syntax and other mechanical pieces of language are spot-on. He has an excellent grasp of subject-verb-object agreement (consent is very important to him), and the only error I’ve ever found in the whole two stories that I read was a missed paragraph return between lines of dialog that might have just been poor formatting on my e-reader. (That was as much as I could take, erotica/porn gives me the giggles something fierce and then nothing gets done for ages.)
For our purposes, let’s consider three levels of ability that are required to count anything you do creatively as “good” – and by “good”, I mean, “publicly acceptable and desired by more than just your mom.” Between these three levels, a balance must be forged because relying too much on one and not another will make your work lopsided and weird. Those three levels are talent, skill, and education.
Talent: The Raw Stuff
When we talk about writing talent, what we’re really talking about is the ability to conceive of unique premises, plots, characters, and worlds. We can see the stories playing out in our heads, we get inspired by things around us, or we are struck by inspiration. We see things from a perspective that others haven’t before, and we want to capture that in a literary format so that we can share it with the world.
There are two problems we have to solve when we struggle with the concept of talent: the first is that not everyone experiences inspiration easily, and the second is that not everyone can express that inspiration in an effective way. What we call “talent” is what happens when someone can hit both of those conditions fairly consistently.
Another way to think of “talent” is as an affinity for something, an attraction or resonance with it. Talent is where you start, but it’s not the end product. Raw talent doesn’t get anyone anywhere until its honed (more on that in a second) – but you won’t have any desire to get it honed if it doesn’t already resonate with you. And, by extension, something that you have a talent for will be easier to learn.
I also want to say that, for the purposes of this argument, at least, talent is not the same thing as simply being good at something – and that is something that gets confused a lot in the colloquial. I’m really, really good at math, and I’ve been told I have a natural talent for understanding how numbers work, but I don’t feel that it’s really a talent: I do not have a passionate drive to learn more math. I can understand it, I can even teach it, but if I sat down at the end of the day and wanted to do something that made me feel like I was being myself the most, math isn’t it.
(Okay, another asterisk here * : I play a stupid number of board games, most of which include math, but appreciating math is not the same thing as having a talent for it. Shut up, Craig.)
Skills: You Gotta Build ‘Em Up
Let’s say for the sake of argument that you have the raw talent. What kinds of skills do you need to learn in order to that talent into a cash cow?
(Hahahahahahahaha. You want to be a writer. There is no cash cow, only Zuul. Not that you can’t be profitable, but don’t go shopping for Lambos or property on the Riviera.)
First, please learn to spell, and then learn about basic sentence structure. Yes, there are plenty of examples of writers breaking the rules to excellent effect, but you don’t get to do that if you haven’t already learned what the rules are.
Oh, look, it’s another asterisk *! English is a trash language made up of the poorly stitched-together pieces of other simpler languages. Yes, there is the proscriptive “ain’t isn’t a word” crowd, but understand that my insistence that you figure out proper spelling and sentence structure is all about effectively communicating your idea and not at all about adhering to some arbitrary standard of syntax. (I’m looking at you, France.)
As an editor, one of the most common mistakes I see when I’m looking at a manuscript and even when I’m reading trad-published stories is pronoun antecedent clarity – and that is a very big deal when you have more than one subject or object in a scene. Think about this sentence: “The dog chased the squirrel, and then it ran away.”You might surmise that “it” is referring to the squirrel, but actually, based on subject placement, “it” should technically refer to the dog – but it’s not used like that colloquially or in person where body language and tone might give us the added context to understand which creature fled.
I strongly encourage my writing students to write the way they speak because using a clear voice is critical in establishing your identity as a writer and as an artist, but if your reader (not your audience, not your listener, not your viewer) can’t tell directly from the order of the words what’s going on, then you have failed to transmit your scene effectively.
And here’s the touchy part: Most readers don’t even know that they know these rules. The mechanics are embedded in the natural cadence of our language, and honoring your reader means adhering to those mechanics. Think about the “correct” order that adjectives are listed: opinion, size, quantity, shape, age, color, origin, material, type, and purpose is always the order that adjectives are given in. It just doesn’t feel right to say, “She was an Italian, young, tall, pretty woman,” even though all of those adjectives are technically pointing to the same object.
I don’t knock anyone for having a hard time with English grammar and syntax. There’s a reason it’s the one of the hardest languages in the world to learn (allegedly). As a Goddamned Professional, though, you need to be on top of your game. If you feel like maybe you missed some basics from grade school, think about taking a course. Again, once you know the rules, you’ll know how to break them well.
Education: You Can Only Know What You Know
I talked about this at the 2024 conference and again during Part 3, but I can’t really stress it enough: you need to have a solid understanding of whatever you’re writing about. This stems from the adage that “Good science fiction is predicated by good science,” and what that means is that even if you’re totally making up something ridiculous, it still has be grounded in something familiar enough to bring the reader along for the ride. “Decouple and recouple the main power supply” is just Star-Trek-speak for “turn it off and on again.”
Obviously, you’re going to come up with new and exciting ideas, but they need to originate from a place that the reader is familiar with, or at least from a place that they can relate to. You can’t throw someone into the middle of a story without context and expect them to invest in it, but you can’t give them that context unless you know it yourself. Even if you’re writing straight fantasy, research the heck out of whatever technology, precedent, or craft you might use. For anything technological, psychological, sociological, biological, pathological, or even quasi-logical, start with Schoogle and keep track of your research with a tool like Zotero. Any scientific discipline should be researched. Become something of an expert of the thing you need to know to not sound like a total rube to someone in that discipline.
As an example, and not to give too much away, but right now I’m writing another collection of novellas that requires a deep understanding of how governments (don’t) work and how they fall, of how individuals react to societal upset and how group dynamics change under different social pressures. I’m plowing through research books right now, including “End Times” by Peter Turchin on cliodynamics and how civilizations rise and fall, and “Roots to Power” by Lee Staples on how small groups organize from the grassroots level. I stop and take notes on how my characters might experience different elements that are covered, and in the end, the story, though fantastical, will not only feel real and familiar but maybe might even inspire people with a heightened understanding of the world we live in now.
Research is something that has to happen every time we start a new story, even if we’ve researched something in the past, because new discoveries are made all the time. After years of doing the background work for science fiction, fantasy, urban mythology, literary prose, and however many other types of stories, you will have a massive collection of just-deep-enough expertise on such a wide range of subjects that you will never run out of things to chat about in a cocktail party.
Practice Makes Progress
As the (classic?) movie Finding Forrester points out, “You write your first draft with your heart, and you re-write with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think.” Similarly, people will sagely advise that writing anything is better than writing nothing because you can’t edit a blank page. Others will tell you that the first rule of writing is that there are no rules, or that you just have to start somewhere, or that writers’ block is a myth, and the problem that a young (or floundering) writer might have is how to sort it all out and figure out which parts apply to them, but the horrifying truth is that they’re all correct.
As literacy is a basic foundational skill in our society, I’m assuming that you have written something before. Maybe you’ve only written emails or school assignments, maybe you have to make a report from a pile of data, or maybe you’re are the absolute most killer list-maker in the world. Point is, you write literally every single day. Not all of it is prose or poetry, but you write.
What prevents people from writing stories? Oh, the answer to that is the subject of so much debate, but, again, every single answer you’ll run into is correct because the things that interfere with our creative processes are unique and individual. A very common thread, though, is the fear of failure, rejection, or finding out that you just stink at writing.
You probably will, at least at first.
So, here, have this:
As I tell my students, I’ve written (as of this article) fifteen (sixteen? seventeen?) full-length novels. The first solid twelve of them sucked like the vacuum of space. The thirteenth was slightly less godawful, the fourteenth was a little better. In fact, nearly all of the things I wrote before about 2000 are completely unreadable, but as time has gone on, I kept at it, plugging away at the keyboard like a typist*. I like to think that I just squeezed all the really bad writing out as early as possible, leaving only the good stories and words behind.
* Gods, I love asterisks! If you don’t already know how to touch-type, please, for the love of the art, learn to touch-type. There are websites, games, and tutorials galore. The goal is to hone the skill of typing so completely that the movie playing in your head just falls out of your fingers.
And this takes practice.
And practice means writing, a lot.
Get all the terrible stories out. Copy things out of a book you like. Write letters to imaginary people. Write about boring things to make them interesting, make interesting things mundane. Write and write and write, and literally no one needs to read it yet if you’re still getting the horrible words out. All you have to do is write. Make words on a page, glyphs on a screen, scribbles on a sidewalk. Write.
And it will never be perfect because perfect is just an illusion of an ending, of a point of accomplishment past which there is nothing else to achieve.
We don’t write so that we can get to the point where we’re so impeccable that we don’t ever have to write anything ever again. We write because we have stories to tell, and as long as we live and breathe, we will find more stories.
Practice makes progress. You write to share, and the more you write, the better you get at sharing effectively.
Read Like Your Career Depends On It – Because It Does
I want to touch briefly on the point that I’ve made several times that writers are not competitors. Despite the existence of writing contests and editorial elimination processes for magazines and publishers, we should approach the distribution of our art as a question of where our work will be best received and not if it’s better or worse than anyone else’s.
Thus, do not be afraid to peek over someone else’s shoulder metaphorically and enjoy their stories.
Obviously, plagiarism is a huge no-no – and I will 100% tattle on you if I catch you doing it – but you cannot find your voice, your style, your rhythm, or your stories in a vacuum. (It’s too loud and makes your ears pop.)
Okay, but what should you read? First, start with the classics in your preferred writing genre. For me as a sci-fi and spec-fic nerd, that includes Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley. Oh, and I would also suggest Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Frank Herbert, Ursula Le Guin, Madeleine L’Engle, Anne McCaffrey, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and the ever-popular Philip K. Dick. Now, move to the more modern era and dig into Brandon Sanderson, Cixin Liu, Andy Weir, James S. A. Corey, Martha Wells, Ann Leckie, and our own William Ledbetter.
You will find that there are periods of time when the muses seem to have abandoned you, so take those opportunities to read. Read for fun, read for research, read for a least a couple of hours at a go. Have some soup or a cuppa and curl up with a book.
It doesn’t even have to be a good book. Just read something. Reading unlocks the super power of being able to tell a story. You will be invigorated by the exposure to someone else’s work. (We call it “refilling the word bag”.)
One Last Thing About Writing Good…
We started off talking about what determines the subjective versus objective quality of a story, and there is another secret super-power you can use to figure this out:
Read your story out loud.
Listening to the words coming out of our mouth – or even having someone else read them to you – will tell you where the weak spots are. You will find the pacing problems, the weird sentence structures, the flow of the dialog, and so much more. If you find yourself getting bored reading a passage out loud, then your reader will definitely get bored with it. If you feel like a word, sentence, or even entire scene is missing, then you know where to flesh it out.
After you’ve done this the first time and made your edits, try reading passages to someone else. If they are rapt and eager for more, you know you’re on the right track.
Plus, it’s great practice if you want to record the audiobook version yourself.
Get caught up: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6 – Part 7