Nearly every beginning writer sooner or later asks (or wishes he dared ask) his creative writing teacher, or someone else he thinks might know, whether or not he really has what it takes to be a writer. The honest answer is almost always, "God only knows." Occasionally the answer is, "Definitely yes, if you don't get sidetracked," and now and then the answer is, or should be, "I don't think so." No one who's taught writing for very long, or has known many beginning writers, is likely to offer an answer more definite than one of these, though the question becomes easier to answer if the would-be writer means not just "someone who can get published" but "a serious novelist," that is, a dedicated, uncompromising artist, and not just someone who can publish a story now and then—in other words, if the beginning writer is the kind of person this book is mainly written for.
The truth is that there are so many magazines in the United States—not to speak of all those elsewhere—that almost anyone, if he's stubborn enough, can sooner or later get a story published; and once the beginning writer has been published in one magazine (some obscure quarterly, let us say), so that he can say in his covering letter to other editors, "Previous fiction of mine has appeared in such and such a journal," the better his chances are of reaching publication in other magazines. Success breeds success. For one thing, publication in five or six obscure magazines virtually guarantees eventual success in some not so obscure magazine, because editors, when in doubt, tend to be swayed by a record of publication elsewhere. And for another thing, the more the beginning writer writes and publishes (especially when he publishes after an exchange of letters with an intelligent editor willing to give advice), the more confident and proficient the beginning writer becomes. As for getting a not very good novel published, the possibilities are richer than one might think—though the pay may not be good. There are always publishers looking for new talent and willing to take risks, including a good number of publishers actively seeking bad fiction (pornography, horror novels, and so forth). Some young writers, by a quirk of their nature, cannot feel they are really writers until they have published somewhere, any where. Such writers are probably wise to do it and get it over with, though they'd be wiser yet to improve their skills and publish somewhere better, for the future's sake. It's hard to live down one's shoddy publications, and it's hard to scrap cheap techniques once they've worked. It's like trying to stop cheating at marriage or golf. To answer the serious young writer's question responsibly, the writing teacher, or whoever, needs to consider a variety of indicators, none of them sure but each of them offering a useful hint. Some of these have to do with visible or potential ability, some with character. The reason none of the indicators is foolproof is partly that they're relative, and partly that the writer can improve—changing old habits of technique or personality, getting better by stubborn determination—or simply grow at a later stage from a probable nonwriter to a probable success.
One might begin the list anywhere; for convenience, let me begin with verbal sensitivity.
Good grades in English may or may not go with verbal sensitivity, that is, with the writer's gift for, and interest in, understanding how language works. Good grades in English may have more to do with the relative competence, sensitivity, and sophistication of the teacher than with the student writer's ability. It is not quite true to say that every good writer has a keen feeling for sentence rhythms—the music of language— or for the connotations and diction levels (domains) of words. Some great writers are great in spite of occasional lapses— clunky sentences, feeble metaphors, even foolish word choices. Theodore Dreiser can write: "He found her extremely intellectually interesting"—language so cacophonous and dull most good writers would run from it; yet few readers would deny that Dreiser's Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy are works of art. The writer with a tin ear, if he's good enough at other things, may in the end write deeper, finer novels than the most eloquent verbal musician.
And it must be added that the true artist's verbal sensitivity may be something the ordinary English teacher, or even the most sophisticated user of language, may fail to recognize at first glance. Many people who care a good deal about language are horrified, for instance, to hear "hopefully" used in the sense "it is hoped," or to hear politicians say "forthcoming" when they mean "forthright," or businesspeople say "feedback" when they mean "reaction" or "response"; and given this distaste for linguistic change, or perhaps distaste for certain classes of humanity, the sophisticated stickler may dismiss without thought an ingenious and sensitive use of the suspect word or phrase. The true artist's verbal sensitivity may well be different, in other words, from that of the usual "writer of good English." Black street kids playing "The Dozens"—piling up ingenious metaphorical insults of one another's mothers, not all of the metaphors grammatical or unmixed—may in fact be showing more verbal sensitivity than the speechwriters who helped create the image of John Kennedy. Moreover, as the example of Dreiser perhaps suggests, not every kind of writer requires the same measure of verbal sensitivity. A poet, to practice his art with success, must have an ear for language so finely tuned and persnickety as to seem to the ordinary novelist almost diseased. The short story writer, since the emotional charge of his fiction must reveal itself quickly, has a similar need for lyrical compression, though a need less desperate than the poet's. In the novelist, a hypersensitive ear may occasionally prove a handicap.
~~On Becoming A Novelist -by- John Gardner
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