January 22, 2024
Dealing with Lack of Skills in Writing: a Misleading Premise
Writing, drawing, composing music, and basically every form of art consists of two components: the artistic one and the technical one. That is, to express ourselves artistically we must first and foremost have something to say, but it’s not quite enough. We must also have the skills to do that. So, what happens when we lack the skills?
We’ll talk about all this in more detail – and we’ll have to start with understanding that the term “lack of skills” is somewhat misleading – but first a couple of examples, just to make sure we’re all on the same page.
As a sculptor, I have a great artistic side. I can visualize forms, shapes, flows, colors and textures, and I can see my artistic ideas in material form. Piece of cake.
The thing is, I have precisely zero technical skills when it comes to sculpture.
I don’t even know how to hold a chisel (is that what it’s called?) let alone use it. So, practically, I am not really a sculptor.
On the other hand, though I lack the skills to play guitar like Slash, I’m “good enough” to be able to compose the music I want to compose – the art I want to express. I suppose you can call me a musician.
Writing, however, is a bit different. And this leads to certain misunderstandings and issues, as I’ll show you.
Is It the Lack of Skills that Leads to Mediocrity?
As the intelligent, perceptive reader that you are, you might have already noticed a significant difference between lack of skills in term of sculpture (and to a lesser extent music) and writing.
Without skills in sculpture – what tools to use, what material, how to proceed at all – you can’t do anything. Similarly in music, without knowing how to play (and why they sound harmonic together) a chord sequence like, say, F, G, Am, you can’t quite play music. It’s not as bad as sculpture – in the sense you can grab an acoustic guitar and with the help of a simple chord diagram you can play something – but it’s nowhere near as easy as writing.
To put it simply, quoting myself from the post on mediocre fiction:
Most arts require a certain level of technical skill to do at all, let alone well. To put it this way, if you gave me a marble block, hammer and chisel (I’m not even sure what tools are required) and asked me to produce anything at all, chances are I’d gradually hack the block away producing nothing.
But writing is different.
As long as you are literate enough to put words one after another and form semi-coherent sentences, you can “write a novel”. In other words, unlike other arts, writing has a much lower threshold to weed out the truly mediocre artists.
But there is still an important distinction to make, which I didn’t elaborate on in that post.
Lack of Technical Skills Can Be Taught; Lack of Artistic Vision Cannot.
“Can Good Writing Be Taught?” I once asked.
The truth is, everyone can get better. But whereas it’s relatively easy to address technical lack of skills – say, teaching about vocabulary, syntax, or narrative pace – improving one’s artistic shortcomings is a different animal.
The reason, of course, is the abstract, undefined nature of “artistic shortcomings”. Like the infamous “definition” of pornography – or indeed the Gothic! – it’s a matter of “I know it when I see it”.
Nonetheless, some of the key concepts we would require to refer to when we want to talk about artistic skills would perhaps be “experience“, “meaning“, “symbolism“, and of course “affect“. To try a comprehensive summation of it: A narrative that has artistic merit will describe experiences that are meaningful (likely because they are relatable) to the reader, perhaps using allegories or metaphors, and above all inspiring an affective response.
So what kind of combinations can we have? It would seem four:
- A work that is technically flawed but artistically solid, for instance a work with simple vocabulary and awkward syntax but with the ability to describe relatable experiences.
- A work that is technically impeccable but lacking artistic merit. Picture a work containing rich vocabulary but which is utterly unrelatable, and you’ve got a good approximation.
- Double trouble (the bad way): A work that is poor technically and with few meaningful things to say. Most of the books fit here.
- Double trouble (the good way): A work that is technically superior and artistically inspiring.
But why is writing a “special case” compared to other arts?
“Even I Could Do That”
In the hilariously intelligent British comedy show Blackadder, there is a scene where the goodhearted but not-quite-Mensa-material character of Baldrick describes the training he received before WW1 started:
I loved the training; all we had to do was bayonet sacks full of straw. Even I could do that. I remember saying to my mum, “These sacks will be easy to outwit in a battle situation.”
That’s what writing is! The way soldiers trained with sacks of straw were considered ready for the battlefield, the threshold for technical skills in writing is basically being able to turn on your computer.
Writing is the infantry of arts; “even I could do that”.
And so, whereas in sculpture you need to understand quite a bit before you start chopping away expensive material with expensive tools, in writing you don’t really need anything.
And yet this is also a blessing in disguise.
The Less the Technical Lack of Skills, the More the Artistic Is Revealed
You see, this coin has two sides: It might be so that sculpture has a certain way of weeding out mediocrity (the term is somewhat of a misnomer; I should’ve said “utter insignificance”), but its relying on technical skills masquerades authentic mediocrity.
In simpler words: Because it feels so difficult to sculpt (or paint, or play music; choose your threshold), whatever is left somewhat magically comes across as acceptable. Of course, as any visit to a modern art gallery will assure you, true art is much more elusive.
Ultimately, the fact that writing is technically much easier to do allows us to reveal authentic mediocrity – a true lack of artistic vision – more easily.
But there is one more thing to consider: What if technical “perfection” not only masquerades mediocrity but in fact inhibits true art?
A Word on Art and Technical “Perfection”
If you want to find technical “perfection” (good luck defining that) in artistic expression, you will open a can of worms.
Still, if we took singing as an example, most people have certain ideas – perhaps exogenous, socioculturally imposed – as to what constitutes a “perfect voice”. Even more so, there seems to be an even better consensus regarding “poor voice”: not pitch-perfect, lacking clarity, lacking rhythmical intonation, and of course a sort-of-subjective (but still with a majority consensus) “sounding annoying”.
With this in mind, there must be very few people who are not fans of The Cure and think Robert Smith’s voice is good, let alone perfect. At least most such people I’ve talked to describe it using words such as “whiny”, “annoying”, and one person called it “like skinning a cat”.
What do you think?
Click to display the embedded YouTube video
30+ years after I first listened to this masterpiece, it still sounds as incredible as in the late 80s. And it is precisely Robert Smith’s voice that assigns it this monumental mass of affect. Nobody will ever be able to sing The Cure songs except Robert Smith.
Parenthetically, while we’re dealing with lack of skills in a technical versus artistic context, notice how another giant of The Cure, bassist Simon Gallup, made a bass line consisting of 4 notes, repeated unchangeable throughout an 8-minute song
“Imperfection” (if we put quotes around perfection, we need to do the same here) is what makes a song – a poem, a novel, a painting – art.
Without imperfection, there is no art.
Without imperfection, there is no humanity.
2 Comments
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“Ultimately, the fact that writing is technically much easier to do allows us to reveal authentic mediocrity – a true lack of artistic vision – more easily.” This is such a perfect sentence.
Writing is easy compared to structure, but creating writing that means something, that connects to a human, that creates that affect you speak of IN that human – that’s hard.
We have conventions – so those basic technical skills don’t get in the way of the art – skip quotation marks around dialogue (or whatever convention you’re used to), and you come across as a PITA. I only made it through All the Pretty Horses because I wanted to see what he did with the Mexican Revolutionary War, as something that I studied in school as a child growing up in Mexico.
Get too different, and you interfere with helping the reader turn all those marks on a page into meaning. YOUR meaning. It’s a parlor trick.
The point is to USE the tools if you know how – to facilitate the flow of information, to coax the reader to continue longer than they were planning to.
Yes, it gets a little stuffy in those limits sometimes, and sometimes it’s necessary to blow up the boundaries, but u instead of you isn’t it (I hope).
You wrote, “Lack Of Skills Can Be Taught” – but I’m pretty sure that’s not what you mean. I had to read it three times. But then my brain is nitpicky that way. Because I’m good at interpreting those marks, and seeing if the thesis you’re proposing makes sense. Just curious if it was intentional.
As a very first thing: You are right to criticize “Lack of Skills Can Be Taught”, it’s interpretatively overloaded in the context of the post; I revised it to “Lack of Technical Skills Can Be Taught” – in the sense, we can teach people (or ourselves) to write better sentences, have a wider vocabulary, and so on, but artistic vision is an entirely different matter. Thanks for that!
As to the crux of the matter: I am particularly intrigued by the balance between “too different” and “just right” you mentioned. It’s obviously a very large continuum, with experimental fiction on one end and “Mr Piglet Went to the Market” on the other. Where we set our own boundary is a never-ending exercise.
Personally (and obviously enough this, too, can only be personal) I enjoy ambiguity in terms of meaning but not so in format or stylistic decisions. As you aptly called it, it’s a parlor trick. “u” instead of “you” isn’t authenticity worth talking about.