The truth, however, is a little more fluid than that. The truth is none of us completely understands what we’re doing. I could have written an opening paragraph about the talents and accomplishments of such as Ernest Hemingway, and the revelation at the end would still hark back to his own admission:
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one becomes a master.
Tales From the Script edited by peter Hanson and Paul Robert Herman (affiliate link)
Screenwriter William Goldman wrote in the essay anthology Tales from the Script
[N]obody knows anything. If we knew what we were doing, every movie would be wonderful.
Feel Like You Don’t Know Enough About Writing? You’re Not Alone
At first glance, that may seem pretty self-defeating. If we’re never going to conquer the art of writing, what’s the point? (I can hear all the perfectionists out there throwing in the towel already.)
But if we flip the coin on its head, and look at the other side, we discover some mighty interesting benefits to this seeming defeatism, including the marvelous commiserative comfort of knowing that even the likes of Hemingway and Goldman struggled with getting stories to work.
Their characters didn’t always pop, their dialogue sometimes fell flat, their endings sometimes bombed—and they didn’t know how to fix things. They stared at the cursor (or whatever authors stared at before the advent of Scrivener) in frustration. They probably procrastinated. They undoubtedly experienced those moments of terror when they looked at the blank page.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? And yet these writers, and many more just like them, have produced lasting literature and film. Hemingway won the Pulitzer and the Nobel; Goldman won two Oscars.
“Not Knowing” Is Just an Opportunity for “More Learning”
Because of its inherent connection to humanity’s emotional and subconscious core, art can be an evolving, shifting, rather nebulous creation that pours out of us in ways we can’t always control.
Every book you write is a new adventure. Perhaps you master each story as you write it, but that doesn’t prepare you for the next story you write. You must learn afresh how to write each story.
You study the craft in order to create the most effective vessel possible for your art, but effective vessels, in themselves, don’t constitute great art. It’s that bit of uncontrollable magic that boils up from someplace you didn’t even know you had that makes all the difference.
None of us can completely control that, no matter how long we’ve been writing, how many books we’ve published, or how much we’ve studied the craft.
That’s the joy of fiction: that this inexplicable magic can somehow pour from your unworthy fingertips and create something that will touch the lives of others and be remembered beyond your own lifetime. Although your continuing conscious understanding of the craft will only help you build better stories as you grow, it’s important to realize that somehow you’re sometimes able to create some incredibly good things, even while still walking this never-ending path of learning.
Wordplayers, tell me your opinion! What are you in the process of learning about writing right now? Tell me in the comments!
Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast or Amazon Music).
___
Love Helping Writers Become Authors? You can now become a patron. (Huge thanks to those of you who are already part of my Patreon family!)
