Are writers made or born? A blend of method and madness

Twenty-six years ago, I wrote a small children’s novella entitled Albert the Chameleon. I was then an undergraduate student at Kenyatta University.

I was so proud of my innovation and quickly dispatched it to a publisher. What followed was a rejection slip. I was crestfallen and my pride was devastatingly punctured. I revised it a number of times, but rejection notes kept coming.

Six years ago, I revisited the story with, perhaps, better understanding of the art of storytelling.  I even changed the title to Nyenyeka the Chameleon.

It was accepted with minor revisions by a local publisher and it occupies a comfortable place in the Orange Book by Kenya Institute for Curriculum Development (KICD).

Going by the sales of the book, it is possible to argue that it is quite popular as a reader at upper primary level.

This brings me to the fundamental question that I want to grapple with today. Are writers born or made? Can writing be taught? From my experience, some aspects can be taught, but others are inborn.

One writer whom I have found very useful in explaining the delicate creative writing process is Alice Laplante. In her famous book Method and Madness: The making of a Story (2009), she argues that to produce a good work, a writer is driven by two things: method and madness.

WHAT I LACKED IN MY FORMATIVE YEARS

Method can be learnt in an academically rigorous systematic manner. It refers to the act of organising and formatting a work of art. I want to presume that this is what I lacked in my formative years. In many ways, writing is a craft, like woodworking or painting that can be acquired, practised and mastered. In this sense, writers can learn about imagery, narrative and scene building in a creative writing class. They can master how to characterise people and build a solid plot. They can also be taught aspects of language which are critical in writing.

Writers can be taught to notice things that other people do not notice, how to create believable dialogue, how to be convincing, how to create surprises and how to avoid being melodramatic. It is also possible to learn about qualities of perseverance and persistence, but I think the teaching ends here.

The second aspect which Alice Laplante finds critical in creative writing is what she calls madness. Each one of us is born with our own measure of it.

This is what is often referred to as inspiration. In every writer, there is some degree of madness. A writer will be inspired to create associations that other ordinary mortals may not visualise. To be creative is, to some degree, to be wild, free, chaotic and adventurous. One has to be wild to see what others do not see. The writer has to be free to defy inhibitions and conjure up wild images.

One has to be adventurous to experience, feel and touch the world around.

I think the biggest challenge to any writer is how to bring method and madness together. Alice Laplante asks: how can one, who is highly inspired, be in sufficient presence of mind to shape all lovely, raw, messy materials into something coherent? How then can one reconcile the method and the madness? Unfortunately, many writers are unable to reconcile the two.

Perhaps that is why the world has very few writers. I almost gave up those early years.

So how does one bridge this gap and reconcile these aspects of the creative process? Alice Laplante has an answer that I believe in. She observes that to bridge this dichotomy one needs to reconcile the working of the left and the right part of the brain. The brain, according to this theory has two sides and therefore two modes of thinking.

The left brain is logical, sequential, and rational.

The right brain is random, intuitive and holistic.

LARGELY USING LEFT BRAIN

We are largely using the left brain which embodies the analytical skills to read a story or a poem and figure out why it does not work. These skills are only good for editing a story. We are trained to favour our left brain over our right brain. This is bad for the creative process especially in generating new stories.

Other thinkers agree with this view. B .J Chute has a more interesting observation on being a fiction writer.

He was once asked what makes him a fiction writer and he had a host of qualities that one needs to have in order to be a fiction writer.

He says that the first quality you need is imagination. He says that imagination is as necessary to the writer as the spinning of webs is to a spider and just as mysterious. It defies analysis and it has been quite properly called “The Creative Impulse”.

Imagination, he says, cannot be created, but it can be fostered and this fostering is part of the writer’s duty.

It is not enough to congratulate oneself on having been gifted with imagination (as I used to do those early years) though it is certainly a major cause for rejoicing. The imagination like the intellect has to be used and a creative writer ought to exercise it all the time.

B. J. Chute also notes that the second quality that is essential for writing is empathy which the dictionary properly defines as “mental entering into the feeling or spirit of a person or thing”. One needs this to produce believable characters. 

The third and fourth qualities are style and patience and this can be taught. Style could be defined as the way in which a thing is said.

Style does not exist apart from the story and if five people tell an identical story, each one will tell it in a different style. The best style will produce the best story and the listeners will turn to it even if they do not know why they turn.

Patience in a writer is many things, but most of all, it is characterised by concern for the words on the page. Thus, one should find the right words and such words can be evasive, very slow to come. At this juncture the quality of patience will spell the difference between disaster and survival.

I am always intrigued by what Morris West said about the art of writing.  He argued that “writing is like making love.

You have to practice to be good at it. Like the best love-making, it has to be done in private and with great consideration for your partner in the enterprise who in this case is the reader”. 

Creative writing students should study and listen to what established writers have said about the art of writing.  Their experiences may be the inspiration they need.