How Big is the Learning Curve, Really?

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Monday, May 14, 2007
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It takes years for a novelist to learn his craft. That's the conventional wisdom. For me, it has proven accurate. I have learned my lessons slowly, and have also had a tendency to forget them over time. My guess is that, for many of the people who teach writing, the same thing could be said. The best teachers are often people who have struggled with the subject, because their own problems equip them to help with the roadblocks of others. I've met very talented writers, people for whom it all came easily, who were not very good at teaching for precisely this reason. They did what they did without thinking. In the same way that the writer who struggles for years in obscurity before landing a publishing deal has much more advice on the subject than the one who finished his first draft, e-mailed it to the agent, and had it accepted by the first editor to have a look. The longer it takes to get there, the more you learn on the way.

The problem is, if I served a long apprenticeship that included countless books and seminars and many years in graduate school then it stands to reason that, when asked, I will say all this is essential. You can't just sit down with a paper and pen and write. But the thing is, you can.

Okay, maybe you can and maybe you can't. The point is, just because I couldn't doesn't mean you can't. Some kids, when the training wheels are removed from their bicycles, ride like the wind, possessing an innate sense of balance. Others veer left and right, crash down, get up, and eventually develop a feel for staying upright. If you have innate balance, you don't want the weeble-wobble teaching you to ride, because he'll make it all harder than it needs to be. Same thing with fiction. If you have an innate gift for narrative, all the checklists and formulae and seminars will only slow you down.

Try it on your own first. Find out what your problems really are. Only then will you know what the learning curve really looks like.