Writers born and writers made

A friend recently told me a story about his son's cross country team in high school. His son one was of a core group of runners on the team who had worked hard, taken special lessons from coaches brought in to help the team, and gradually brought their times down incrementally throughout the year. About halfway through the year, a kid of Ethiopian heritage joined the team. He'd never trained and hadn't really ever worked out in his life. In his first race, he blew away the team. 

I know people aren't entirely certain there's a genetic reason Kenyans and Ethiopians win nearly every long distance race, but it seems pretty hard to exclude genes as a big part of the story. Certainly, this kid, who was born and raised here and so never got a chance to develop his lungs in the elevation of the Rift Valley, didn't benefit from the other reasons often suggested for why Kenyans and Ethiopians dominate long-distance running. He must have had genetic advantages. 

It reminded me of an editorial that made a bit of a splash a few years ago, in which a former MFA instructor "finally told the truth" about MFA programs now that he didn't teach at one anymore. The big thing I took away from reading it was that the guy felt that writers were either born with a special something or they weren't, and even in MFA programs, most weren't. You had to be born with it and then develop it early or you were never going to have the stuff. He did admit that you could have the stuff and not develop it if you were lazy, and you could be born without the stuff and still put out something decent if you worked hard, but generally, you had to be born with the right neural wiring and then follow up with the right kind of upbringing.

Assuming we limit the editorialist's comments to "high art" fiction, I can't deny he's wrong. I don't think he's right if we are talking about general novel writing. Science fiction writers who are experts in fields of science often write good fiction without having worked their whole lives at it. Same with mystery, crime, fantasy, and romance. But with literary fiction, when I read the smartest lines by an Elizabeth McCracken or Emma Cline or Mary Gaitskill, I think yeah, there's no way I could do that, no matter how long I work at it.

That leaves me wondering. My friend is a big believer in nature being a stronger element than nature in success in life. I've lived most of my whole life, though, believing the opposite. I don't think you can do anything if you put your mind to it, but I do think that if you work at something, you will almost always get better at it. And I think that the difference in success in life for most people is simply putting in more than the minimum effort. Maybe that's because I've been around a lot of government employees in my life, so I've become used to the idea that putting in effort will make you stand out, but I've seldom seen hard work go to waste. I'm a big believer in the idea that if you work hard, it will pay off. It may not pay off with everything you hoped it would, but it will pay off.

Is that enough to keep going on as a writer, though?

That's reassuring for most things in life, but writing is something I want to be one of the best at. I want to be in The New Yorker. I want to be good enough that I could live off being a writer. I want to be remembered for what I've written. I want what I've written to be a comfort to people struggling with life. Anything else is a failure. And at my age, it's a pretty good bet I'm going to end up a failure. 

But the odds are that I was never going to be good enough. Maybe it's because I started too late. I didn't really develop a focused interest in literature until my 20s, and then I had a family, and I didn't get to serious writing until 40. More likely, though, even if I'd started earlier, I'd never have been good enough. Writing isn't unique in this, of course. Plenty of people who get started on things find out halfway into childhood their dreams will never come true. Writing is just different from sports in that it allows you to harbor fantasies a lot later in life. 

A lot of writers I know who've had even less success than me tell me they keep going because if they quit, they don't know if they'd be able to keep living. I guess a lot of us are doing things we never imagined we'd be doing for a living, and one way to live with that is to keep telling yourself you've got something else secret going on the side. I'm a little too honest for that, even if lack of honesty might make me happier. 

I don't think it's really possible to live happily. I think it's possible to live for a purpose, and that purpose will keep you centered and fulfilled. But when the thing I'd like to be my purpose isn't really possible, then what does one do?

Writing as fuck-you

When I was an evangelical as a young man, I used to believe that if it weren't for God, there'd be no point to life. I wondered why non-religious people didn't all kill themselves. Then I became one. The best I could come up with in the meantime was to continue living as an act of defiance. If I'd be put into a meaningless universe, I could continue living and acting as though life did have meaning, if nothing more than as a fuck-you to the mad fate that had placed me here.

Over time, I replaced defiance as a raison d'etre with writing as a purpose. If I'm never going to achieve what I'd like to as a writer, though, then maybe it's best to combine the two ideas. Continue living and writing, even though writing is a continuously meaningless act, out of nothing less than defiance. I wasn't born with enough talent? I started too late? Still going to keep writing. 

The meaning now has to change. It can't be that I'm trying to be Melville. That's gone. It's not going to happen. But I can try to get better. It's disappointing, of course, to have to lower my expectations so much. The good news, though, is that the desire to get better isn't a pipe dream. It's nearly a law that if you work at something, you will get better. Even if there are cosmic speed limits in place for everyone based on things they can't control, nearly everyone can also push just a little bit closer to those limits if they just keep at it.