Best Writing Advice: There's No Such Thing As Talent

A writer's main activity is procrastinating. Sometimes it's useful procrastinating, like time spent letting a manuscript marinate before starting to edit. Sometimes it's the procrastinating that happens when you have a deadline (self-imposed or otherwise) that you really don't feel like keeping. I'm excellent at both.

Self-portrait in charcoal,
September 2008

Recently, I've gotten back into art as a form of procrastination. I enjoyed it when I was younger, though I was never particularly good and, like with writing, my teachers taught me how without the subject ever penetrating deep enough to matter. Thanks to a poor teacher in college, I barely passed my required art class. She noticed that I wasn't doing the techniques correctly but couldn't be bothered to teach me the right way. Didn't stop her from grading me down, though.



Thankfully, you don't have to be very good at whatever you do to procrastinate for it to be a worthwhile pursuit. So I looked up tutorials and got to work. It turns out, the writing advice I once received from a critique partner applies to art as well, and it's the most important advice I've ever received, inside or out of writing:

Flower in oil pastel,
circa spring 2009

There's no such thing as talent.

Sometimes things come easier for one person than another, but in every project you take on, something will come easier for someone else. And there is nothing that cannot be taught. A tall person might have the advantage in basketball, but tell that to 5'3" Tyrone "Muggsy" Bogues, who played for the NBA from 1987 until 2002.

If something about your writing isn't working, practice. Find a critique partner (or several, or an editor) and learn what your weaknesses are. Work on them. Practice creating plots that are organic. Practice writing dialogue. Practice weaknesses in short stories until you master them, then move on to novels. Don't be afraid of writing something that is horrid and unsalvageable. Just learn from it and improve the next time.

Portrait of my daughter in colored pencil,
July 2015

The only thing that separates "experts" from "n00bs" is the number of hours put in. Sometimes those hours are spent learning. Concert pianists practice their scales and arpeggios daily. Sometimes those hours are spent on actual projects. When I paint my nails, I run the polish over my finger and move onto the next. When I get my nails done professionally, they mess up as much as I do. They just go back and remove their mistakes. They use more layers of polish to keep it on longer. When a child colors a pictures, they grab blue for the sky, green for the grass, and peach or brown for the person. When a professional artist colors a picture, they grab five different blues, three grays, a white, and a few purples for the sky alone.

The change in perspective is everything: lacking in talent means you're setting the blame externally. Lacking in practice, however, is something you can fix.

Don't use a "lack of talent" as an excuse for not reaching your goals. Call it a "lack of practice" and then get practicing.

Flowers in oil pastel
June 2015

Rochelle Deans sometimes feels like the only writer on the planet who rushes through the writing so she can start editing. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and young daughter. Her bad habits include mispronouncing words, correcting grammar, and spending far too much time on the Internet.

The Art of Poetic Space

Before I was an active writer, I was a reader with a passion for fantasy art. I discovered Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series when I was in college and embarked on my own version of fangirl geekdom.

Fast forward a decade or two and you’ll still find me at the comic conventions. There is something wonderful about a comic book—it’s not just reading with pictures. It’s a story with art—and the two are inextricably connected.

Comics intrigue me because of their brevity—so much story and action packed into tiny frames. One has to really get into the story to fully appreciate the nuances of each angle, each line, each visual. Eventually, I came across the work of Charles Vess, who illustrated my favorite issue of Sandman.

Charles Vess

I met him at the Baltimore Comic Con in August, where he spoke about the concept of poetic space.

Images and Words

I’m not surprised to hear such a term coming from this artist. You know the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words?” His pictures actually are: entire volumes have the power to spring from a single illustrated page.

Vess said poetic space leaves room for the reader to fill in the details and participate in the experience. When asked how much poetic space an artist should use, he replied: “As much as possible!”

As a writer, I was intrigued by his notions of poetic space and, with it in mind, I examined my style of writing. Did it exist in my work? Should it exist in my work? After all, writing is not drawing. A painting may invoke emotion and meditation but a book—well, a reader would only know what we told them.

However, there’s a point where enough is enough, already. Endless lines of description begin to sound more like a shopping list. Yeah, you get a picture, but is it fun reading? Meh. Not really.

Poetic Space Equals Wiggle Room

The balancing point is a thin line. Trouble is, everyone places that line differently.

I’m a contest junkie. I can honestly say my first pages have been read, shred, scoured, devoured, chewed up, spit out, praised, razed and a slew of other critiquing verbs by at least a hundred different judges. They all had individual ideas of how much—or how little—description my opening pages should have.

We’ve heard it time and time again—action should predominate those early pages. Hook the reader. Draw them in. Backstory and narrative summary can come later. Or…can it?

My story has a first person point of view so it’s not like the narrator is going to spend a ton of time talking about her own appearance in the first pages. Yet, I had more than a handful of people wanting for more—I can’t count all the times I got “I don’t even know what she looks like.”

However, I got far more compliments on the intrigue and the hook. If the contest only gave the first few pages, I can let the crits slid.

Why? Because of poetic space.

If someone is only going to read the first five pages, their minds can fill in those missing details, if they need to. The rest of the story has plenty of space to flush out those details later.

If, on the other hand, those first five pages don’t have anything else to grab onto, all the poetic space in the world won’t redeem them. There’s the balance: poetic space is a tool to be used along with every other device writers use to create our stories.

Engaging the Reader

Vess’s remarks backed up a small conversation I had with my editor, Rose Mambert of Pink Narcissus Press. We were discussing some cover sketches and she said she didn’t have a clear idea of what the protagonist looked like but knew the hero looked nothing like the sketches. The part about my main character concerned me. Did I need to go back and revise?

“No,” Rose said. “A physical description of Sophie is not so important. Readers will fill in all those missing details, anyway. Though if there's a picture of her on the cover, that will probably stick in the readers' mind, so we do want it to match up with how you envision her.”

Whew. Poetic space to the rescue.

In a splendid interview, Vess spoke more on the topic of poetic space in his discussion of artist Frantisek Kupka. He said there’s a trend in fantasy art to show every detail, and light the subject in such a way that it eliminates all the mysterious shadows. No room left for the reader’s interpretation.

Poetic Space Enhances Our Stories

As writers, we, too, need to incorporate those mysterious shadows into our characters. If you lay everything out on the line in high definition perfection, then there is no subtle nuance to develop later. No place for a telling quirk. No room for a surprising flaw.

That would be an affront to our writers’ sensibilities. It’s our need to peer into the shadows and come up with our own interpretations that makes us writers in the first place. We look into the vague and the subtle and we pull a story out of it.

Out of the poetic space.

It’s a service, as well, according to Vess. When we have to supply our own imagination to fill in that poetic space, we train ourselves to continue the story. We become more proficient in telling the stories running through our brains.

We develop our creative senses. We become better writers.

So. Poetic space. Who knows? It just might be our redemption.




Ash Krafton is a speculative fiction writer who resides in the heart of the Pennsylvania coal region, where she keeps the book jacket for "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" in a frame over her desk. Visit the Spec Fic Website at www.ashkrafton.com for updates on the release of her debut novel, Bleeding Hearts, forthcoming in early 2012 through Pink Narcissus Press.