Talent? Or Just Practice

It’s really, really hard to write. No, I didn’t exactly mean that, but to write well.

Of course, you can’t just generalise like that — obviously, writing a technical manual is a far different skill than writing a speech.

No, I mean writing to entertain without being boring, pedantic or wordy. But how do some writers work a word like “exigencies” into a passage where it fits like a glove and I can’t?

I’m reading The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume 1 and some of it is just astoundingly good writing. I guess a great start is getting the vocabulary, but that cannot be all. You have to know exactly when to use a hard word without it sounding out of place. Of course I know what "exigencies" means, but why doesn't it come to me when I'm writing?

I’m in California at the moment and I went to a session with three other musicians and I finally appreciated, after years of playing, that a cascade of notes does not equal Good. They have to all be in the right place at the right time. Okay, so a lot of people like Al di Meola (the guitarist) or Allan Holdsworth, but many also find their incredibly fast noodlings to be just a useless waste of sound waves. So now I choose my notes instead of just mindlessly trying to play them as fast as I can. (Ah, the joys of middle age.)

But this should not be confused with a musician who just can't play quickly as opposed to one who can but chooses not to, just like a person with an arsenal of vocabulary who doesn't necessarily drop it like flyspecks on every page or, say, Picasso, who could paint realistic paintings like a champ but chose not to. All these things have to be done judiciously, precisely so, or you’ll lose the listener or the reader or the looker.

So maybe, this is where the talent comes in. The magician can't just pull a pigeon from his sleeve without it pecking him to death without a large amount of talent (and a heavy dose of practice.)

Obviously, false notes, like typos, are the real place to start, but once that’s cleared up it becomes another thing, something that has to be refined to an enormous degree in order to be called truly “good.”

I hope the practice I’ve done on my Thai curry will please the troops tomorrow. I'll need every spice in my arsenal to be exactly correct.