Over and over, I keep coming across beliefs about talent and practice that I’ve found to be untrue, from both my experiences and those of other writers across time and space. Some of these are specific to writing, while others apply to all forms of creative work.
“Genius comes fully formed”
Maggie Shipstead once said: “In our culture, we have these twin myths: One is that genius falls fully formed from the sky, and people who are truly brilliant don’t have to work. The other is that anyone can do anything. Neither is remotely true.”
Regardless of who we are and where we grow up, it’s not impossible for us to become good writers. Because it’s a skill, it’s one that can be developed with regular practice. Even if someone was born with a “natural talent” for language, they’d still need to practice, edit, write, rewrite. Nature’s gifts aren’t in our hands, but effort is, so clinging to the myth only prevents us from putting our energies where it’ll actually make a difference.
You must have an inner voice compelling you to write (and if there isn’t, you aren’t meant to be a writer)
In his first letter to Franz Kappus, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke advised him that he should look inside himself, to “Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write” and ask if he must write, and to proceed if the answer is yes.
At 15, reading the letter in my third language, I took Rilke’s words quite literally and decided that he was wrong. No one had asked me to write; it’s just something I started doing on my own. I’d never heard some voice inside my head that compelled me to write. I did it because I liked it.
Writing is as much as expression as it is a skill. It’s an art form, and no one should be barred from thinking they’re not fit for creating art just because some spiritual voice isn’t calling out to them to do so. You do it if you want to—it’s as simple as that. A character in the bestselling Korean novel Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop sumps up both the above points perfectly: “Writing was something I wanted to try. So, instead of worrying whether I had the talent or not, I told myself to start writing, to just do it. I wanted to live like this at least once in my life.”
You have to be a certain kind of writer
When I first started writing, I’d wanted to publish a novel because I’d only read novels until then. Later, I discovered that one could be a writer by writing short stories and essays too. More importantly, I didn’t have to choose one particular form. Over the years, I’ve written in different forms at different points—in the future, I might be writing something else entirely.
The market may expect you to pick a form, but if selling books isn’t your concern (and even when it is), you are free to do whatever you like. The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa was one extreme example—he wrote not just as himself but as dozens of other personas that he invented, all of them talking to each other, coming from different walks of life and schools of thoughts, writing poetry, essays, stories, criticism. Truly, there is no limit to what you can do.
We have to become professional writers
It’s become common to suggest to people, when they demonstrate that they’re good at some kind of art or skill, that they should make a career (or at least a side hustle) out of it. And some people might need that advice to finally build a life for themselves that they actually enjoy.
But because writing is an art, a means of expression, its worth is not attached to money. One can be a writer without ever making a single penny from their efforts. Becoming a professional is not mandatory. Publishing what you write isn’t mandatory. Only doing the writing is.
Not becoming a professional is not a “waste” of talent. It’s a conscious decision to live life—this one, mortal, lucky life—the way you would enjoy best, and that enjoyment may actually require for your writing to not be associated with an income, rather than the other way around.
You have to practice publicly
These days, when writers do decide to become professionals, they also have to promote their own writing. One way of doing this is blogging, which authors like Chuck Wendig and Austin Kleon have used effectively by sharing their writing and its process. Many writers also use the public aspect of blogging to create accountability and show up regularly—the existence of readers gives them the push they need to keep practicing.
But practicing in public is not necessary nor is it always helpful. For one, the time you spend writing publicly to give others a taste of your writing could be spent writing privately, doing second drafts or edits of your work. Most publications don’t accept stuff that’s been published on blogs before.
Writing publicly also creates pressure to write things a certain way—the internet very quickly sorts people into types and audiences form an expectation that a particular person or platform will deliver a specific kind of reading experience, over and over. The algorithm rewards this, and sooner or later, we find ourselves writing to please these expectations. We think of more ways of doing the same things, rather than finding the courage to experiment, or to move on from a topic or a trope once we’ve exhausted it. We can, in other words, stagnate as writers even if we keep producing stuff. (The word “producing” should give you a hint of the repetitive nature of the work.)
For many of us, putting our first drafts online (for how much work can you edit if your practice itself is public?) also means that we’re focusing on creating the next thing rather than staying with a single piece of writing and giving it the time and attention it needs to become something more polished and structured. If we keep running, we won’t necessarily get somewhere, which is what can happen when we write something then immediately put it in front of the world.
Private practices lets our own ideas evolve rather than constantly be influenced by what the algorithm or other people’s comments on our writing tell us we should do. The latter can be valuable, but at certain points of the process and after a lot of practice. From the get go, we wouldn’t want to always be told what to do.
You have to have a routine or a ritual
Anthony Trollope required himself to write 250 words every 15 minutes. P. G. Wodehouse wrote at night, after his shift at the bank. Some writers like to do morning pages or take a walk. I wasted years reading about other people’s writing routines and trying to replicate them, hunting for some magical trick that would bless me with unshakeable discipline. But I found that the only way to do it is to just sit and write, whatever the time of the day, or whenever an idea (or the mood) strikes (or doesn’t). Nothing can substitute willpower. Seeking a ritual, then, or believing that once you have it, writing would be easy, is often a misguided mission.
Writing is never easy. If there’s one truth among all the myths and misconceptions, this is it.
Bio: Ratika Deshpande is a writer from India. Her work has appeared in Authors Publish, Reactor Magazine, the Brevity Blog, and other platforms.
