Are good writers born or made?
The question came from an editor interested in improving the quality of writing at her newspaper. It sounded plaintive. Like many an editor and reporter, she wanted to know what produces great writing. Is it a mysterious brew of intellect, imagination, and ego that someone either has or doesn’t, or is it a skill that can be learned?
The nature vs. nurture debate has been on my mind because I’m spending a couple of days at the place where I learned much of what I know about writing. The Providence Journal is a newspaper, but for me it was an academy, the school where experience — a range of challenging assignments over eight years, from night cops to project reporter, along with tutelage from editors and the inspiration of colleagues more skilled than I — taught me lessons about my craft that influence me to this day. More than anything, my time there convinced me that that I could learn and grow as a reporter and writer.
I’ve been having a good-natured debate with Gerald M. Carbone, a talented Journal reporter who won the 1995 non-deadline writing award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He falls on the nature side of the question. You can teach someone to be a good writer, he argues, but great writers are born with that special blend of creativity that sets them apart from the rest of us. Ged Carbone may be right, but I’ll be satisfied to be a good writer, especially if experience teaches me that the learning never stops.
More than a year ago, I was trying to figure out how to organize a mass of material about the newspaper published the day my father died, 43 years ago this Tuesday, for a memoir I’m writing about three flawed Irish-American fathers.
My father died on March 25, 1960, and I had turned to that day’s edition of my hometown newspaper to see if it could help me understand more about the world when I was 10 and my life changed. The Greenwich Time was full of fascinating information, but I couldn’t figure out how to organize my story. Looking for inspiration, I turned to “Fourth Genre,” a textbook edited by Michael Steinberg and Robert L. Root, Jr., who also founded a journal of the same name that publishes memoirs, essays and other fact-based narrative forms grouped under the umbrella of creative nonfiction. Their book is an inspirational anthology of creative nonfiction, but it is also a useful handbook for students of the form.
In his essay, “Collage, Montage, Mosaic, Vignette, Episode, Segment,” Root seemed to be talking directly to me. “Often I advise other writers stuck in linearity and chronology, ‘Why don’t you try collaging this?'” That’s exactly where I was stuck — hogtied by the calendar, the clock, beginning, middle and end.
Among the strategies Root described was “choosing an extra-literary design,” drawn from the material itself. He described how one writer used tarot cards to sequence her memoir about her friendships. Another used locations in a subject’s home — the Great Room, the Landing, the Grotto — to organize his essay.
Root’s essay became a life preserver for a writer drowning in doubt and confusion. The solution to my problem had been staring at me from the front page of the Greenwich Time. The newspaper’s index, the outline of the edition’s contents.
I took advantage of this newspaper’s format not only to organize my story, but to use it as a device to excavate memories, scenes, a lost past.
I divided the story into six sections drawn from the contents of the index, including real estate, TV and radio listings, and personals. I discovered my order out of sequence this way. The segments granted the freedom to make “associative leaps,” (Carl Klaus’s phrase) that Root says “may replicate the fragmentary nature of ‘recollection and reflection’ [and] are the form’s most exciting aspect.”
They allowed me to range over the last 50 years, to make connections between the dimly-remembered past and the present, as this passage demonstrates:
Classifieds…………………………………16-19
Despite the rosy economic forecast that day, the employment picture in Greenwich was bleak and dispiriting as the dishwater skies that shrouded my world (at least the sky in my memory) that Friday. In the Help Wanted-Men section, there were just a dozen options available to my father, who had been out of work for months and desperately needed to get his career back on track.
A Mrs. Schenck sought a chauffeur-butler, to “drive an executive between Stamford, Conn. and New York City three days weekly and expertly cook and serve simple daytime lunches in Park Avenue office same day.”
McArdle’s Seed Company wanted a driver (“must know town”), and a young man to do general store work; General Factory Help was available at Empire Brushes in Port Chester; Captain Bob Billings was looking for a “Launchman” for a private yacht club.
In the remaining listings, various unidentified employers were seeking a mason (“for outside work”), a night doorman to work the 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. shift (“must be sober and reliable”), a painter, an experienced routeman, and a shipping and receiving boy (“Will train.”) A lawn mower shop was looking for a “young mature man, experience preferred.” No salaries were provided, except for the routeman’s $3-an-hour starting wage and $1.50-an-hour for the shipping and receiving boy.
With Daddy out of work, the burden of supporting our family of eight had fallen on my mother, and two of my older siblings, Jay and Shelley, who were still in high school.
Mom had gotten a job as a subscriptions clerk with Fawcett Publications — the paperback giant’s headquarters occupied a block at the bottom of Greenwich Avenue — that paid, if memory serves her, $25 per week. Shelley, a waifish brunette, worked Saturdays in a podiatrist’s office. Jay, a tall stringbean of a boy, contributed his earnings as a golf caddy at the Greenwich Country Club, where his appetite for dawn-to-dusk rounds around the 18-hole course (“loops” in caddy talk), had earned him the sobriquet “Mad Looper.” Tuition waivers provided by Monsignor Guerin, our pastor, kept the six of us enrolled at St. Mary’s elementary and high school.
I wonder about these jobs that my father might have considered that day. Who filled them? Did they become opportunities for advancement? Did the employers still exist?
On an impulse, I dial the number that Captain Bob listed in his ad four decades earlier. A couple of calls later, I’m talking to the Indian Harbor Yacht Club historian, eighty-three-year-old Chan Bates. Captain Bob is long gone, he tells me. “He was one of our waterfrtont managers. Had this heavy Maine accent. He was built like a ton of bricks, and he was a character.” As for those seasonal launch jobs, they were always parceled out to “young, eager college boys.” Daddy wouldn’t have had a prayer.
I call Jay and read him the help wanteds. My brother turns 60 this year and in a sweet case of poetic justice, he has capped a 30-year career in banking, most of it overseas, by taking over as president of Putnam Trust Co., the leading bank in Greenwich.
“Daddy thought he was white collar,” he says.
Who could blame him? Among other roles, the Greenwich Time served as town crier of promotions, heralding corporate advancements with one-column head-and shoulder shots of unsmiling men in dark suits and ties posed over captions titled “Named” (executive vice president ), “Appointed” (national sales director), and “Get Top Posts” (senior vice presidents). On an inside page devoted to stock listings, advertising for brokerage services, and an oil drilling fund, the perks of executive life were also on display in a seemingly-irresistible offer from the Industrial Bank of Commerce: “Loans for executives By Phone. Borrow $1500 – $2500 – $5000 this month. Make no payments until June. Your signature the ONLY requirement. No endorsements…No collateral.”
Jay and I agree that, in this entire puny catalogue of classified agate, there was just one possibility that would have been suitable in Daddy’s eyes.
“SALESMAN,” the headline shouted in the largest, boldest type of the lot. Daddy was nearing 50 after an uncertain living in sales for half that time; I can picture him eagerly drawing a circle around the listing until he read on and realized that the requirements, like those stipulated for the prospective doorman, put him out of reach.
To sell business machines in the Stamford area, the firm was looking for someone “Young and aggressive.”
Last November, the editors of The American Scholar accepted my piece, and editors Anne Fadiman and John Bethell continued to teach me still more lessons during their careful editing. I’m convinced that its appearance in the spring issue would never have been possible if I hadn’t continue to study my craft.
Like most creative endeavors, writing is shrouded in myth or clouded by discussions of rituals. E.B. White said he sometimes started a writing stint with a martini, Poet Laureate Rita Dove composes by the light of two candles, one writer uses No. 2 pencils, another swears by WordPerfect, and so on. But mystification doesn’t help writers who want to write better.
Can writing be taught? Can it be learned? Sometimes when people ask me this, I sense they’re looking for me to support their decision to give up — either on themselves or someone else. If stories aren’t good enough, the reason must be that the writer simply doesn’t have the innate talent. But there are too many autodidacts out there, people who have taught themselves to do things they wanted to do, for me to agree.
There is one quality that must be inherent, and that is desire. You have to want to write, because the world, and your own doubts and fears, will array a battery of resistance.
So how do you keep learning?
Read.
Write.
Set a goal. I will learn how to spell cacophony (one “a” two “o”s) accommodate, (two “o”s), judgment (only one “e”). I’ll try to understand how Anne Hull of The Washington Post sees the world and then uses fresh arrangements of words to make me see it in a new way.
Go to school. It’s spring and the thoughts of writers of all ages should turn to the National Writers Workshops. In two weeks, the NWW season begins, and these low-cost weekends devoted to the craft will be available coast to coast, offering a chance to learn from leading writers, editors and teachers who donate their time and expertise. How I wish, when I was just starting out, that I had the chance to hear how the best writers do it.
It’s easy, especially given the twin whammies of war and a tough economy, to surrender to despair about your prospects for improvement. Ged Carbone may be right that the great writers are born that way. But with patience, hard work and steady devotion to their craft, good writers can be made, if not great, certainly better.
