Honing Your Talent: A Workshop© by Holly Lisle
All Rights Reserved
"Everyone can be more competent, but talent is innate,
God-given -- you either have it or you don't."
Is that true?
Well, what is talent, first of all? Sometimes if you can define
a thing, look at all of its parts, maybe take them apart and play
with them a little, you can figure out how to create some of that
thing -- or some more of it -- for yourself.
We see the results of talent every day: people who run faster,
jump higher, think smarter, write more powerfully than we do. And
in our minds, we know that a lot of what they do that sets them
apart is training. Long hours, hard work, bloody-minded persistence
in the face of downturns, embarrassments, defeats, and failure.
That's what we know in our heads. What we tend to believe in our
hearts is that they each have something more. Some magic spark,
some touch of fairy dust or the hand of God or one lucky roll of
the genetic dice that makes them different than the rest of us --
and that makes what they have done therefore somehow unattainable.
Folks, there's good news and bad news. And I'm going to give you
the bad news first. They have talent that you don't have. Everything
they have ever done and everything they have ever dreamed has given
each one of them an unduplicatable set of special skills. They have
a unique perspective of the world, and an equally unique way of
expressing that perspective that you can never get, no matter how
hard you work.
Depressed? Don't be. Here's the good news.
You already have as unique a background as any Gene Wolfe or Thomas
Harris or Lois Bujold or Robert Parker. By the simple act of being
alive, you have a toolkit full of tools that are your alone.
The trick is to learn to use them. And that is the purpose of this
workshop.
So let's dig into your personal Talent Toolkit and see what you
have to work with. Get a notebook and a pen, sit someplace comfortable
and interesting, and brace yourself. We're going to do a lot of
writing.
Tool Classification
Writers' tools break down into several basic groups:
Content Tools, Style Tools, and Presentation Tools.
We'll unpack each one and play with it a little to give you a chance
to see what each will do.
Content Tools:
Tools that Draw from Present Experience
Sight, Sound, Touch, Taste, Smell
In the very broadest sense, these five tools encompass all of your
writing and draw from both past and present, but we're going to
be using them more narrowly, and in more detail, than in that broader
sense. By being present in the moment -- any moment -- and focusing
on where you are and what is going on all around you, you gather
in the details that make your writing come alive.
Right now, what do you see around you? Write it down in as much
detail as you can muster, from the color of the chenille bathrobe
you're wearing to the way the dust motes float in the beam of sunlight
falling through the window. Get the people in, the shapes and masses
and colors, as if you were telling a painter how to paint a scene
he couldn't see, and your life depended on him getting it right.
(Career-wise, at least, it does.)
When you finish, relax your shoulders, close your eyes (as long
as you're sitting someplace safe), and listen. What sounds do you
hear up close? How about a few feet away? In the next room? Outside
close? Outside at a distance? What about any voices? What emotions
do they convey even before you listen to the words? And what words
do you hear? How about animal sounds, machine sounds, plant sounds,
environmental sounds? When you think you have everything, rewrite
your previous scene using only sound cues.
Now sensation -- start with the itch between your shoulderblades,
the feel of clothes on your skin, the weight, texture, and temperature
of the air in the room, and move outward incrementally -- the seat
supporting you, the cat against your bare foot, the hair falling
into your eyes, the table beneath you hand, the carpet on the floor.
Move outward, being concrete, digging for the truth of the way things
feel.
Taste and smell are our blind senses, but do the best you can.
What do you taste right now, what do you smell right now?
Before you can write anything that captures a moment or a world,
you have to be alive to the world, and to everything all five of
your senses are telling you. Practice this exercise until you're
used to noticing details.
Past
Memory
Much of the real power of your unique talent will come from your
memory. From memory, you'll draw and reshape the incidents that
will give your characters depth and permit them to reach others.
The characters in your fiction will not be conceived or born outside
of you, in people you know or watch. They'll first come from inside
of you, from your hopes and fears, and will then be dressed up in
other people's skins and voices so that your stories won't be monotonous.
So --
- Write down the five most embarrassing things that have ever
happened to you, in as much detail as you can bear.
- Now write down the five biggest mistakes you've ever made. Again,
go for detail, and lots of it.
- The five things you most regret doing to someone else.
- The five things that scare you most.
- The five bravest things you ever did.
- The five people who most changed your life, for better or worse.
- The five places that you remember most clearly.
- Your five biggest failures.
- Your five best friends. (Lifetime)
- Your five worst enemies. (Lifetime)
By now you've probably started wondering, When do I get to list
my successes, all the good things I've done, all my happy moments.
You don't. Fiction is not born out of all the good things you've
accomplished; those aren't the things people want to read about,
no matter how much fun it may be to write about them. Conflict lies
in the things that don't work out, so the useful moments in your
life will be the screw-ups you've made. And the more public and
painful the belly-flop, the better fuel it will make for your work.
And if you're getting uncomfortable little warnings about the nature
of writing fiction and what sorts of people make successful writers
. . . well, hi. People who do well following rules and coloring
inside the lines and fitting in are the CEOs of their companies.
Or middle managers. Or guys on the line Welcome to Misfits'R Us.
Dream
Maybe I should relabel this one "Nightmare" -- but hard
as I find this to imagine, there are actually people in the world
who don't have nightmares.
If you have terrifying dreams -- things that wake you from a sound
sleep and leave you shaking, breathing fast, and afraid to leave
any stray body parts dangling over the bed -- you can get paid
for them. As a long-time nightmare sufferer, this was a revelation
to me, let me tell you.
Happy dreams are pretty worthless. Anything from finding yourself
at work in your pajamas to fighting off vampires to rescue your
kids, though, has a place in your fiction.
If you have bad or interesting dreams, start keeping track of them.
Write down the ones that wake you up, that leave you feeling uneasy.
And then look for ways that you can work them into your fiction.
In Minerva Wakes, I used them straight out of the plastic
wrap; in other books, I've drawn themes, characterization, and motive
from them.
Future
Hope & Fear
You can't live in the future, but you can write there. List the
things you most hope for, and the things you most fear. Five to
ten of each. When you're done, consider how you might transfer these
hopes and fears to your characters.
Style Tools
Raw talent may come from the mystical etheric realms, but if you
can master the technical elements of storytelling, you can turn
raw talent into something infinitely better -- namely, a dependable
skill. The elements you need to master include:
(Links are for relevant articles or workshops I’ve done on
the site or in Vision.)
Each of these alone requires more space than I have in a single
short workshop. Multiple books exist about each of these style tools;
you can be writing professionally for years and still find new facets
of each to explore.
The thing you need to remember about style tools is that each of
them represents a series of learnable skills -- if you're deficient
at any or all of these, effort, study, and a great deal of practice
can correct the deficiency.
Presentation Tools
- Grammar
- Spelling
- Typing
- Manuscript formatting
I remain flat-out stunned by the number of people who want to write
(or more likely, who want to have written) but who lack basic written
language skills. Here are the bleak facts -- if you don't know the
difference between past tense and past participle, cannot figure
out when to break a paragraph, or have shaky or nonexistent spelling
skills, you have no more chance of making a living from writing
than a carpenter who can't use a hammer or saw or plane does making
a living from woodworking.
The good news is that basic grammar skills are learnable. The bad
new is that most would-be writers are too lazy to take the time
and effort required to learn them well. If you're telling yourself,
"It doesn't matter if I mess up spelling or punctuation or
stuff like that -- that's the editor's job to fix," quit now.
I'm not kidding. If you're not willing to learn the tools of the
trade, writing for a living is not in your future.
If you're willing to learn but just aren't proficient yet, no problem.
The first thing you do is read. A lot. You'll get an instinctive
feel for grammar from reading the work of good writers. This means
people who are writing in your genre, and those who aren't. I recommend
any works by the following writers:
Mark Twain
Robert B. Parker
Lois McMaster Bujold
Roger Zelazny
Theodore Sturgeon
Stephen King
Lawrence Block
There are multitudes of writers who tell good stories, multitudes
who write with beauty and technical proficiency. The writers I've
listed above consistently do both, and they are members of a rare
breed indeed.
Following that, pick up a copy of Strunk & White. Read
the book; learn the rules. And for grammar practice, you can visit:
It can seem overwhelming. There's so much to learn, you can't get
it all in one workshop or from taking one course or from reading
one book. The more you learn, the more you discover remains to be
learned.
But writing isn’t something to do in a day. It’s a life
course, a path. A journey, not a destination. You’ll never
be as good as you want to be, and every book you write will be the
failure of a perfect idea – but as you progress, every day
will also bring its rewards. You’ll get closer to expressing
your perfect idea.
Your talent is everything about you that makes you unique. With
effort, you can shape and sharpen it. So to answer the statement
at the beginning of the article – yes – talent is innate.
You’re born with it. Everyone is. However, not everyone chooses
to pursue it.
Do you?
Burn It, Bury It, Let It Live >>
(reprinted from Holly
Lisle's Vision: A Writer's Resource
Vol. One, Issue 5 -- Sept/Oct 2001)
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