The Natural-Born Artist.

Is there such a thing? (Office Hours)

Well, I’m back home, feeling healthy again, looking at a relatively quiet summer, during which I plan to rest up while getting back to work – these two things go hand-in-hand for me. It will be a busy fall, with teaching, and lots of writing-related travel in September (schedule to come), and the opera in October, but I’m looking forward to it all.

Now, on to today’s question…

Q.

Hi George,

I have a theoretical question more than a craft question. I have always assumed that there was such thing as a natural-born artist, someone who from their early years either yearns to or does express themselves in one or more creative fields. I’m not just thinking about prodigies like Rimbaud, Mozart, Picasso, Nick Drake etc., but those who begin writing in college, get an MFA in their 20’s etc. I’m of course aware of famous late bloomers but have always considered them the exceptions that prove the rule.

I have always taken it for granted that although I have always loved books (and music), I am not a natural artist. I didn’t even attempt to write a story until my 30’s. I remember when I was about 14 my guitar teacher encouraged me to write my own songs with lyrics. I went through the motions but really didn’t have the slightest interest in writing a song - clearly not the attitude of a natural artist. But lately I have started to rethink my assumptions. The more I write and the better I get at it, I wonder if I have been selling myself short and that I may be a natural artist who just took a very long time to discover it.

So, my question is, what is your view on whether for most artistically successful writers (and I know “artistically successful” is subjective, but whatever that means to you), the yearning to express oneself creatively is manifest from a relatively young age? And how does that relate to the question of talent (you have often spoken about “running up against the limits of our talent”)?

Lastly, and I hope you don’t get tired of hearing it, but thank you for Story Club and the community surrounding it. It really is a minor miracle that it exists.

A.

What a deeply interesting question. Thank you so much for it.

I think of it like this: any person has an innate curiosity about life, and an energy toward it, that may manifest itself in all kinds of ways throughout the course of their life. They’re interested in the world, they get involved in things (even if those “things” are purely interior, by the way), they connect with other people, they get in over their heads, are passionate, make fools of themselves (if only quietly), they attempt big things, abandon them, move on to other things.

And then each of us, at some time or another, to a greater or lesser extent, might look around and wonder, “O.K., what the heck is all of this about, anyway?”

And that’s the artistic impulse.

Now, certain of us have some early experience of art and think, “I’d like to try to induce that feeling in someone else. There’s power in that.”

In other words (and this was the case for me) they discover an artistic ambition by noting, even dimly, the way that some works of art affected them. But they might just store that notion away, thinking, “Oh, I could never do that,” even as they’re thinking, “It would be so cool to do that someday.”

Three examples from my life, that I’ve written about here before:

1) Watching my father fall off the couch with laughter during an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

2) Feeling the incredible community tension in a theater while watching Jaws.

3) My internal reaction while reading the Hemingway stories in In Our Time – an intense desire to find Nick Adams-like overtones in my own life.

But I was not an early writer, and I didn’t go into stand-up, and didn’t have an aspiration to become a film director – these experiences just kind of swam around in my head powerfully while I went to engineering school, with a little tag on them that said, “Maybe someday.” I was “treasuring them up in my heart,” quietly, because I didn’t know where to start, and, to tell the truth, was afraid to start, because I was afraid I might screw it up.

But was I an artist all those years?

Well, I think so. My mind was behaving like the mind of an artist – observing, categorizing, dreaming, preferring this to that, trying to understand everything by making a story out of it.

Was I a working artist?

Sort of. I was playing a lot of guitar, exerting my taste in that way, sporadically sitting down to write “stories,” which were really just soppy, shapeless prose poems. And I was reading, although badly, in a way that was limited by my lack of self-confidence, i.e., I tended to read what I already knew I liked, instead of exploratorily.

So, I was definitely not one of those “natural writers” our Questioner describes. No one, I promise, would have talked to me or read my writing and thought: “Someday, this guy is going to publish.”

I wasn’t confidently writing every day, didn’t identify as a writer. Wasn’t a prodigy of any kind, was far from the best-read person in my peer group.

But I will say – I had a certain something. It was an energy, for sure, that, at that point was manifesting in ways that I now find kind of embarrassing. I had, uh, a zest for life. (Here, I could insert some photos of myself at the Colorado School of Mines, living it up, cracking jokes, lifting weights, earnestly playing Dan Fogelberg songs at a coffeehouse, confidently sporting a proto-mullet. Could, but I won’t, but…trust me.)

There was something happening there, but no one could have said just what. 😊

I’ve mentioned this here before but I always loved this slogan used by the New York State Lotto: “Hey, you never know.”

As someone who’s taught writing for many years, I don’t know a better mantra for anyone involved in the arts.

Why do we need to know? To know if we’re approaching writing correctly? To know if we started too late (or too early)? To know who is going to make it or isn’t, to know if so-and-so “has it” or doesn’t?

The more we know – the more we insist on being sure – the more doors we close.

For example, if we have too many ideas about how a story we’re working on should be, or must be, or is intended to be, we might miss out on what the story itself has in mind for us.

So, “hey, you never know” is a form of admitting that there might exist a potential within something that we put at risk by overmanaging things.

This can be true, as well, about a person’s artistic path.

We “never know” how an artist might suddenly appear in the world.

Someone can nurture a desire to write something for a long time and then suddenly, all of that percolation time creates a magnificent result; someone can delay writing because the current manifestation of their talent is disappointing to them and then can suddenly erupt, out of sheer frustration, into some new mode. All that waiting might have felt, in real-time, like the result of some core inadequacy: they couldn’t, just couldn’t, work within the conventional form, and this felt, from inside, like failing. But in fact, the conventional form wasn’t sufficient, and the new form hadn’t arrived for them yet, and the “artistic work” was exactly equal to waiting, and all of the discomfort and even shame they might have felt while waiting was exactly what “being an artist” required of them, at that time. Someone might have to live a long time before the thing they were born to say becomes fully formed and accessible to them.

Next time you get stuck, or feel like a fraud, or that you’re wasting your time, try it: just say to yourself, very kindly, “Hey, you never know.”

This is a statement of faith in the process.

For me, “faith in the process” means trying to nurture a positive, hopeful feeling about whatever it is my artistic self seems to be up to, no matter how wacky or blurry or puzzling or inept it may seem at the time - believing that my artistic self is on to something, and that part of my role might be to stay out of the way and trust/be patient.

So: I try to go easy on my artistic self, treat it as a friend, not judge it too harshly, give it permission to wander off the path, make a mess. I am, in effect, saying to my artistic self, “Oh, you poor little guy. You are not me. You are your own separate entity. And you are trying so hard. I wish you well, and I’m going to try to be a good friend to you.”

Remember those detective shows, where there’s a gifted, crazy detective, who’s always racing off after a wild hunch, and there’s an assistant, who does a lot of shrugging and following?

I think of myself, artistically, as both of those people.

There’s the playful “detective” side – intuitive, goofy, non-judgmental – that creates the text, and knows things he shouldn’t, by rights, know. And there’s the assistant, responsible for keeping some semblance of order, and ensuring that some kind of progress is being made…the part of myself that is always auditing and assessing, asking, “How am I doing? Is this a waste of time? Should I change course?”

But we can coach that assistant, make that entity kinder and, therefore, more helpful.

Ideally, the assistant is going to be doing a lot of – well, not only shrugging and following – but also encouraging. “You want to try that? Go for it. You’re probably exactly right. And if not – I still support you.”

Kind of like that.

A kinder assistant makes for a more daring detective.

Or, to go deeper into the woods/say it another way: what if we tried to believe that everything we did and felt (and avoided, and screwed up) was, not only part of our long artistic journey, but was the journey? (Even the embarrassing old drafts we can’t bear to read now, even that stupid wasted summer where we wrote a whole novel from the point-of-view of a twig, for God’s sake.)

A corollary of “Hey, you never know” is: try to be at peace with whatever you’re doing. Trust that something is working itself out, even through your errors (especially through your errors).

What if whatever approach you’re taking is exactly right? What if your subconscious is incredibly bright, and is leading you – has always been leading you – in the right direction?

Or: what if you just tried to assume that this was the case?

This can be a weirdly powerful thing.

For some reason, this image comes to mind: a friend is very hungry, for a specific thing, but she can’t say what, exactly. You are in a new city, where there’s a sprawling food court.

You very patiently let your friend wander around, confident that, in time, her good sense will lead her to exactly the right meal for her

You are showing trust in the food court (all those cooks, doing their best), and in your friend (there she is, alive and smart and attentive to her own desire). All will be well, because both the food court and your friend, as you are visualizing them, are good and adequate and even brilliant.

The food court is the vast expanse of artistic potential (or, we might say, the incredible range possible within the short story form); your friend is your artistic self.

And (to come somewhat back to the question), one form of this generosity is to say to ourselves: “However I got here, I am in the perfect place to do beautiful work. No conventional wisdom, no forbidding idea about what an artist’s life should look like, or the path an artist “must” or “should” take, can interfere with that perfect placement, if only I believe in it.”

So, anyway, my hunch, dear Questioner, is that, yes, you are “a natural artist who just took a very long time to discover it.”

There’s a comfort and a confidence in your tone that tells me that you’ve largely answered this question for yourself already. What kept you from discovering that you were an artist, it sounds like, might well have been some preconceived notions about how an artist is supposed to feel or behave. And that’s O.K., actually – my guess is, your practice and dedication have been informed positively by that delay.

I wish you the very best with your work, and thanks for the question.

P.S. I want to offer a recommendation from a long-time Story Club member Rosanne Scott: the beloved writer and teacher Garth Greenwell is offering a seminar on the novels of Henry James, based on a class he has taught for many years in the MFA program at NYU. Sounds like it would be an amazing experience. You can read more about it here.