Talent And Skill, DNA And Lifestyle

Our maximum lifespan is programmed into us at conception.  There is nothing we can do to add to / extend / prolong / lengthen our lives.

When the genetic clock ticks down, we die.

Period.

End of discussion.

What we can do with a healthy lifestyle is maximize the quality of however long we have to live.

True, our lives can be shortened by misadventure.  We can truncate them ourselves by deliberate or unintentional means.

But what we can never do is beat the clock.

A good lifestyle, a healthy lifestyle -- and by that I’m not saying we all need rigorous physical fitness regimens but just avoid consistently unhealthy behavior -- and we get the chance to enjoy our lives to the fullest, however long those lives may be.

I miss friends who could still be with us if they hadn’t followed lifestyles that repeatedly exposed them to unhealthy risks, exposures that eventually caught up with them and claimed them before their due date.

Talent and skill are the creative equivalents of DNA and lifestyle.

Skill is a relative term.  Anyone with practice can improve their skill.

Talent is what sets the limits on what you can do with that skill.

There’s a line in Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz* where Roy Scheider’s Joe Gideon character tells a young woman, “I can't make you a great dancer.  I don't even know if I can make you a good dancer.  But, if you keep trying and don't quit, I know I can make you a better dancer.”

Before he became *R*A*Y* *B*R*A*D*B*U*R*Y*, Ray Bradbury was just another mouth-breathing fanboy, an autograph hound who slavishly and imprecisely imitated all the worn-out tropes of hack pulp writers he adored.

Go to the Internet Archive and track down some of Ray’s earliest stories in Planet Stories and other bargain basement pulps.

In the words of Dave Sim, the guy sucked wet farts out of dead pigeons.

The difference between Ray and all the myriad other hacks competing for column space was Ray’s talent and self-awareness.

It proved a slow rolling enlightenment, but it rolled, it moved forward.  In one of his autobiographical short stories later in his life, he wrote about the moment when he was hanging out with a bunch of fellow autograph hounds on the outskirts of a movie premiere, hoping to get some movie star -- any movie star! -- to sign his autograph book.

And he wondered if he wanted to keep chasing other people’s autographs…

…or if he wanted other people chasing his.

That proved his first step in fulfilling the destiny his talent DNA held for him.

Acquiring the necessary skills?  Those were the painful follow up steps he took, one trudging foot after another, until the day came when he finally crossed the threshold from hack to genuine artist.

Up to a certain point, everything he wrote went straight to the pulps.

Then one day he realized what he wrote was good enough to send to the slicks.

That’s the day he left the genre ghetto.  Oh, he still paid the occasional nostalgic visit…

…but he no longer lived there.

To invoke All That Jazz again, Joe Gideon speaks another heartbreaking truth in that film:  “Nothing I ever do is good enough.  Not beautiful enough, it's not funny enough, it's not deep enough, it's not anything enough. Now, when I see a rose, that's perfect.  I mean, that's perfect. I want to look up to God and say, ‘How the hell did You do that?  And why the hell can't I do that?’"

You either hear the music or you don’t. 

As an editor I’ve encountered far too many writers who don’t hear the music, who can’t see the vision.

They buy all the how-to books, they take all the courses and seminars, they sign up for countless writing groups where they share stories and feedback…

…yet they remain deaf, they remain blind.

When they’re hard working and sincere in their efforts to maximize their talent -- even when said talent is woefully absent -- I wish them the best.

Who knows?  They might be freakishly lucky and hit a grand slam home run the next time they’re at bat.

Let them. 

Conversely, there are literally hundreds of writers and artists far more deserving of attention and success who never manage to connect with a paying audience.

If they’re lucky, later generations discover them.

If they’re not, they’re forgotten just like the legions of pulp hacks.

But that’s immaterial to the talent.

By the same context as those without talent who keep consistently applying themselves, I’ve seen more than a few genuine geniuses sabotage themselves by wasting their talents on the trivial.

That’s the pit Ray Bradbury came perilously close to falling in.

That’s the pit so many potentially great creators dive into headlong when they feel the frustration of not being able to create that one beautiful, perfect thing.

Creativity is a process, not a finished product.  It matters less where one ends up that as one keeps going.

Too often for the genuinely creative, the frustration manifests itself in ways of killing the pain of that frustration.

Drink / drugs / disastrous relationships, we’ve all seen too many brilliant careers cut short when some creators’ dreams fall short of reality.

There’s no substitute for the Work.

But to enjoy the Work, you need to do the work.

© Buzz Dixon

*  What, you haven’t seen this movie?  Go watch it right now!