WHAT COUNTS MOST AND IT AINT TALENT
WHAT COUNTS MOST – AND IT AIN’T TALENT
The Zen of Novel Writing – by James N. Frey
We are all something else besideds novelists, but if you are not a novelist in your heart, at your core, you are a dilettante and should not bother trying to be a novelist. Being a novelist is not just a matter of reading a book of technique and fiddling around at your typewriter putting little blotches of ink on paper. If you were to list the qualities a person needs to become a novelist, what would you put first? A college education? Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and Daniel Defoe never attended college. Neither did many modern writers of note: Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Dashiell Hammett, Ambrose Bierce, and Willa Cather, to name just a few.
What about talent? If you attend writers’ conferences and writing workshops around the country, you will soon see that there is no shortage of talent in America. Most anyone who puts his or her mind to it can write a cogent sentence and find fresh metaphors. Many can invent interesting characters and dazzle you with snappy dialogue. Some can even tell a crackling good story without ever reading a book on how it’s done. When you look at their work, raw and unpolished, your heart will beat fast and you’ll think you’ve discovered genuine talkent.
But most of these folks with so much raw talent will not make it as novelists. Why? Because they lack what’s truly necessary: self-discipline, dogged determination, and stick-to-itiveness. Talent just gets in the way, because if you have talent you expect writing a novel to be easy and it isn’t, no matter how much talent you have.
The writing of a novel takes a great deal of time and the expenditure of a great deal of emotional and mental energy. Time normally spent with friends and loved ones will have to be sacrificed. Few novelists play golf, go bowling, or watch much television. Novel writing is like heroin addiction; it takes all you’ve got.
Here is what happens to the vast majority of people who what to write novels:
They start out having a vague dream. They read about the writer’s life: Hemingway fishing in the Gulf, Faulkner drinking his way through Hollywood, the wild parties, the sex orgies, the drugs, consorting with the rich and famous on Broadway. Most fo
The Zen of Novel Writing – by James N. Frey
We are all something else besideds novelists, but if you are not a novelist in your heart, at your core, you are a dilettante and should not bother trying to be a novelist. Being a novelist is not just a matter of reading a book of technique and fiddling around at your typewriter putting little blotches of ink on paper. If you were to list the qualities a person needs to become a novelist, what would you put first? A college education? Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and Daniel Defoe never attended college. Neither did many modern writers of note: Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Dashiell Hammett, Ambrose Bierce, and Willa Cather, to name just a few.
What about talent? If you attend writers’ conferences and writing workshops around the country, you will soon see that there is no shortage of talent in America. Most anyone who puts his or her mind to it can write a cogent sentence and find fresh metaphors. Many can invent interesting characters and dazzle you with snappy dialogue. Some can even tell a crackling good story without ever reading a book on how it’s done. When you look at their work, raw and unpolished, your heart will beat fast and you’ll think you’ve discovered genuine talkent.
But most of these folks with so much raw talent will not make it as novelists. Why? Because they lack what’s truly necessary: self-discipline, dogged determination, and stick-to-itiveness. Talent just gets in the way, because if you have talent you expect writing a novel to be easy and it isn’t, no matter how much talent you have.
The writing of a novel takes a great deal of time and the expenditure of a great deal of emotional and mental energy. Time normally spent with friends and loved ones will have to be sacrificed. Few novelists play golf, go bowling, or watch much television. Novel writing is like heroin addiction; it takes all you’ve got.
Here is what happens to the vast majority of people who what to write novels:
They start out having a vague dream. They read about the writer’s life: Hemingway fishing in the Gulf, Faulkner drinking his way through Hollywood, the wild parties, the sex orgies, the drugs, consorting with the rich and famous on Broadway. Most fo
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