In the 150th episode of The Writing Coach podcast, writing coach Kevin T. Johns addresses the much-asked question, “Can great writing be taught?”
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why comparing yourself to”great writers” is pointless
- The role that natural talent and genius play in achieving success
- What skills beat out talent almost every time
- Why you don’t have to be able to play guitar like Eddie Van Halen to be a musician
- The role persistence, interest, and curiosity play in learning to write
- The importance of “strapping on your skates” and “hitting the ice”
- And much more!
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below:
The Writing Coach Episode #150 Show Notes
Get Kevin’s FREE book: NOVEL ADVICE: MOTIVATION, INSPIRATION, AND CREATIVE WRITING TIPS FOR ASPIRING AUTHORS.
The Writing Coach Episode #150 Transcript
Hello, beloved listeners and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach Kevin T. Johns here.
Wow, it definitely is a welcome back. This is, in fact, our first episode of 2023. This is the longest gap between episodes we’ve probably ever had in the program.
Where have I been? What have I been up to? Why have I not been podcasting? Well, we will get to all of that in a moment . . .
STORY PLAN INTENSIVE IS BACK!
But first, I want to tell you about something that is also back, and that is the Story Plan Intensive challenge. This is my free four-week program filled with training and resources and homework assignments that help you craft an outline for an incredible novel in four weeks or less. We’ve had hundreds of writers go through the program. We’ve seen tons of success, and I’m so glad to be running it again. We kick off the first week of April. To get signed up, head on over to www.kevintjohns.com/story-plan and we’ll get you signed up there and get you all of the training videos and homework assignments so that you can craft the perfect outline for your next book.
Where Have I Been?
Now, where have I been? Well, I never talked about it on the podcast. It’s kind of personally related, not really related to writing or to coaching, but throughout last year, I was dealing with some pretty serious health issues that finally culminated in me requiring some surgery on February 1st. So I spent most of January prepping for surgery, and I’ve spent all of February recovering from surgery. Now we’re into March, and recovery is going great. I’m feeling well. The surgery went great, and I am back. I’m back podcasting to you, and as I said, I’m going to be hosting the Story Plan Intensive challenge next month, so make sure you get signed up.
I am so glad to be back in the saddle. So glad to be talking to all of you amazing writers out there. Now I’ve read a group coaching program called First Draft, and this is a program focused on getting the first draft of your novel written. (If you want learn about that program, head on over to www.kevintjohns.com/firstdraft. All the details are about the program and how you can get signed up are there.) But in First Draft, one of the things that it includes is a weekly question and answer section where we hop on live as a group, and I answer all of your writing and writer’s craft and writer’s life-related questions. One of the questions we had recently was, can great writing be taught? And so I addressed that on the call, but I wanted to bring it to the podcast listeners as well, because there’s so many people who feel like maybe they’re not naturally talented, they’re not some natural born genius of an author. And so they spend their time wondering, is this really worth it? Can I actually ever learn to become a really good writer?
Natural Talent
Right at the core of that question is something related to talent, I think. I think if someone’s asking the question, can great writing be taught? There’s an inherent self-consciousness about the natural of their talent. If you feel like you’re a rock, a born rockstar, then you’re probably not asking about how to learn to get better. Let’s first off, just talk about this idea of talent. So often when we are thinking about talent and when we’re comparing ourselves, we’re comparing ourselves to writers like James Patterson, Stephen King, Virginia Wolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.K. Rolling — whoever the hot writer is now or then — we are looking at these people and we’re saying, can I ever write as good as them? And the reality is most of us never will because those people aren’t even people.
<Laugh> What I call them is aliens. They’re like the 0.5% of professional authors who are totally mutant aliens, who are not from this planet, and who just have this natural ingrained genius that most of us, 99.5% of us will never have and can never replicate.
Now, I’m going to use some hockey analogies in today’s discussion. So let’s talk about what I’m discussing here in hockey terms. What I’m talking about is the Sydney Crosbys of the world, the Alexander Ovechkins, the Wayne Gretzkys. No matter how hard an athlete trains at hockey, no matter how hard they study the sport, they’re never going to be as good as Crosby or Gretzky or Ovechkin. Again, these people are aliens, they’re outliers. They’re the 1% or 0.5% of people that yeah most hockey players will never be as good as Wayne Gretzky, but does that mean there’s no point in being a professional hockey player? Does that mean you can’t learn to improve your skills even if you are a professional hockey player?
Of course not.
Genius Does Not Guarantee Success
You know, so right from the beginning, we gotta just take the outliers, take the geniuses, throw them out and say, listen, there’s a God-given talent at sports, at writing, at whatever that some people have. And no, we can’t learn to be as good as Wayne Gretzky, but we can learn to become a better hockey player. We can learn to be a professional hockey player and be in the top stratum of our writing sphere or our sports sphere or whatever. Now, here’s the other thing I want to talk about. When it comes to talent, talent, and even genius in no way guarantees success, there are so many artists who have wasted their success, whether it be through drugs, whether it be through suicide, or whether it be through just never even trying.
Maybe the greatest writer ever is sitting out there, but they don’t have the focus or the interest to sit down and write that great novel that’s just sitting inside of them. Think of someone like Kurt Cobain who killed himself at 27 years old. How many great albums could he have written? And especially now in hindsight, looking back and knowing what a genius songwriter Dave Grue is as well. Cobain and Grl could have been the McCartney and Lennon of our generation, and Kurt killed himself, and we lost all of that. So did Virginia Wolf, so did Hunter s Thompson, so did Hemingway. So did so many incredible artists who cut their lives short before necessary, and who could have given us so much more great work. And I mean, those are again, super successful Outliners who outliers, who knows how many super talented people out there wrote a book or never wrote a book and gave up or gave in to addiction or whatnot.
And so rather than sitting around going like, oh, I wasn’t given Hunter s Thompson’s talent, natural talent, I wasn’t given Wayne Gretzky’s talent. Well, whatever, you know, talent is not what guarantees success.
Get on the Ice
And so let’s go back to our original question here, because it’s not necessarily about talent. The question is about writing great writing can great writing be taught? And I think the answer is absolutely yes, but it comes in conjunction with actually doing the work. Okay? So let’s go back to that hockey analogy. You can sit in the stands and read 20 books about hockey. You could know absolutely everything there is to know about the history of hockey. You could know how to set up the perfect power play. You could know what each little defensive maneuver is, but guess what? None of that matters when you get down onto the ice and put your skates on for the first time.
Okay? So all of that knowledge, all of that training, all of that technique has to keep me combined with years and years of training on the ice. All right? And I see so many wannabe writers or aspiring writers, reading craft books, attending programs, taking courses, hanging out in social media groups, talking about wanting to be a writer, but not actually getting on the ice and doing the hard work. Okay? So you absolutely have to write in the conjunction with the craft training that you are learning in order to be effective. You could know every technique in the book, but if you’re not practicing executing on the technique, then none of it matters. So what we’re getting into here is the idea of work ethic, this idea of nose to the grindstone, putting in the hours to get truly great at something. And you’ve probably heard the thousand-hour rule, right? And other people say you have to write a million words to get really good at writing. Who knows what these actual numbers are? But the point is, you need to spend a lot of time doing the work, practicing and getting better at it.
Now, James Clear, he’s the author of Atomic Habits. He tells this great story about interviewing an Olympic weightlifting coach and the Olympic weightlifting coach who was talking about what differentiates the gold medal winners from everyone else. And what he said was that the folks who win the gold as opposed to the silver or bronzes or who never make the Olympics, are the people who can put up with the tedium, the boredom of practicing the lifts each and every day. All right? So Olympic wave for the lifting only consists of three lifts. Not all that varied a sport, right? And so the people who are the who win the gold are the people who go into the gym and practice those same lifts day after day after day without getting bored or pushing through the boredom.
Interest and Curiosity
And this is why I think something like interest is so important. I think something like interest and persistence, they outweigh talent. Any day you could be the most talented writer in the world, but if you don’t have the persistence to stick with it, or if you don’t have the interest to pursue getting better at it, it doesn’t matter at all. Someone who’s willing to sit down, sit down and write day after day, year after year, and who is combined with an interest, a curiosity in getting better, in finding out what makes good writing work, that is the path to success so much more than something like natural talent. Now, something else we want to think about is what do we mean when we say great writing? Because some of the best technical writing isn’t the most popular writing. You often hear people disparaging works like say 50 Shades of Gray or Twilight and saying that these books are not well written.
Well, the millions of readers who bought their books cared that they weren’t well written, no. What they care is that there was a story, that there was content that connected with them, that moved them, that interested them, that kept them turning page after page after page.
You Don’t Have to Play like Eddie Van Halen
Now, if you know me, you know, I come from the punk rock world. And what I learned in the punk rock world is you don’t have to be able to play a guitar like Van Halen to be a great punk rock guitarist or to write a great song. Great punk songs are about passion. They’re about fun, they’re about catchiness, they’re about attitude. They’re about fast and loud. None of that necessarily has to do with perfect execution of technique. So sometimes I think when people are thinking about what is great writing, to me, great writing is writing that people love and that inspires them or moves them or makes them cry, regardless of whether that’s perfectly technically accurate or not, doesn’t matter to me.
What matters to me is that people are moved. Now, that said, the quickest road to moving people is understanding your art form. No, you don’t have to be able to play like Van Halen to understand punk rock, but to better understand punk rock, you probably want to have an understanding of other rock genres out there so that you’re better positioned in your little niche.
Can Great Writing be Taught?
So, which is the say, can great writing be taught? Absolutely, especially given that story. Teachers like myself have spent basically the last a hundred, 140 years examining storytelling, really figuring out what are the great fundamentals of story that readers love? And this was long before Joseph Campbell doing his Heroes Journey’s work in the fifties. I’m going back to the modernists. You know, EM Forrester was writing books about writers craft at the turn of the century. We’ve been talking about how to write a novel that people love for a long time now, and we’ve gotten pretty good at teaching people those fundamentals so that then they could focus on the content, then they could focus on the passion, then they could focus on that unique thing that’s going to a make your reader laugh or cry or drop the book in shock.
Fundamentals of Writing and Story Plan Intensive
Okay? And so fundamentals are what I teach. These are the things that I’m working with with my writers because they’re coming to me with passion. They’re coming to me with interest, they’re coming to me with persistence, and they wanna know how to get better.
Returning to where we started, we kicked off this episode discussing Story Plan Intensive. Do you want to set a foundation for success at the beginning so that when you write your novel, you’re that much further ahead of everyone else just diving in? If so, you want to participate in Story Plan Intensive with me this April. Head on over to www.kevintjohns.com/story-plan, get signed up now. We are going to have an incredible month where you are going to learn how to write a great outline for your novel in less than a month.
All right, so can great writing be taught? I believe it can, but I want to put my money where my mouth is. Come join me this April for Story Plan Intensive. You will see that the fundamentals of a story outline, that plan that can set you up for success in the long term with your writing can absolutely be taught. And it doesn’t involve you having to read a dozen books. A doesn’t involve a six-month program. It doesn’t involve a thousand dollars investment. All you have to do is sign up with your email address, watch the videos, do the homework, and by the end of April, you are going have an incredible outline for your novel. So I hope to see you in the story plan. Head on over to www.kevintjohns.com/story-plan, and I will see you there.
It’s Good to be Back!
Boy, it feels good to be back. It feels good to feel like myself again. I had some rest time. I had some more rest time <laugh>, and now I am gearing up to go. I’m so glad that you are back. Thank you for sticking with the podcast. Despite this long sabbatical, we are going to have a great 2023 from here. Now, if you aren’t already subscribed, make sure that you get subscribed so that I can see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach
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