Talent Trumps Technicality

Personally I feel talent and some hard work trumps technicality. You can have a beautifully written story, grammar perfect, syntax on spot, but if your voice and content lack then it's useless to a reader looking to get into the world  you are creating. 

I had gone through this on Ipublish and other sites where others boasted about what they accomplished and where they've gone to school and such. And that's fine. Confidence is wonderful. But when you get down to it, their bark was bigger than their bite. 

Sure they appeared to put down eloquent sentences and such, but their story content lacked--or at least wasn't on the league with which they judged others. 

Of course, that site was a free-for-all where writers were unfairly pulling down other writers with fake reviews and such, but you get the point. Fancy education and knowledge of the finer points are excellent and help a lot, but if you don't have the talent then it doesn't matter. 

I've been told numerous times that school messes up your skills. Especially creative writing courses. I've heard too many horror stories about this. A professor at NYU even said that they can mess you up. The reason being is most of the time, not all, but most of the time the teachers are trying to mold and sculpt you into what they thing writing and creativity is. Don't get me wrong, I've heard the students go to the teacher without knowing an ounce of what to do. And the teachers have to start from scratch here, or input their creative mainframe, if you will. 

But if you have an idea of where you want to go with your writing, or already have your voice, then you don't need someone else pushing their junk down your throat. 

Now classes/courses are good, they let you have creative freedom and I'm not knocking school. I'm just saying be careful, because sometimes you can mess with the natural talent you already have. 

There are ways to learn the finer points, and if you want to know what a gerund is or a dangling past participle. That's the gears and workings under it all. But the first draft you are going to make may sound as though it came from a 1st grader--and that's fine. It's what you do to it after that matters. You know, how real the conversation is between the characters and how you put together a scene to be as close to a real situation so it rings true with a reader--so they go, "Yeah, I can see that happening." Then you have them. They come back for more. They want to see where you are taking them next. And that's part of the magic. 

WCM 


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