Sunday, November 30, 2008

it still takes work

Thanks for the comment, Etc-- feel strongly about that, too (not that I would call myself an artist).

There are a lot of subissues going on here that are specific to my mother and my relationship with my mother. A recurring theme--especially every time that she asks me to write a complaint letter for her-- is, "writing comes so easily to you!" Well, no, not really, nor does it to many people who are actual writers.

Furthermore, the things she's heard about Pushkin and Bulgakov, even if they were true, hardly inform on the creative processes of every writer, ever.

But it's easy (as well as a cop-out) for mom to go there, because she doesn't write at all; it's convenient to generalize, to "other" those that do write, thereby removing any expectation that she should put some effort into writing herself.

There was another article worth mentioning, although I can't find it (maybe it was in the Times?), about how there are some people who don't believe they can learn. They think we're good at what we're good at and won't get better at the other stuff. I'm not one of those people, and those people drive me nuts (especially when I'm responsible for teaching them something). In various language classes that I've taken, I've been amazed to find people who think that they don't have to do the work, that it will just come to them. Yes, I am somewhat naturally predisposed to picking up languages, but it still takes a f*load of work. It's not absorbed by osmosis, unless you're little.

The creative process is interesting to me. I'm not great at it, and I have in the past dismissed it as something that's out of my reach, but as an avid consumer of its products, I'm fascinated by the mental mechanics of its producers and I've enjoyed the New Yorker and other articles that shed light on how it works. So it's that much more frustrating to hear mom basically dismiss the artist as a mere transcriber of a message that comes from outside. And it would be one thing if she said it but didn't spray it, i.e. lecture me about it for half an hour at a time without meaningfully considering what I have to say on the matter.

By the way, Jonathan Safran Foer is a really good writer, I really enjoyed his book (I've not read "Everything is Illuminated" but "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Up Close" was very good). I haven't read the book about Haiti, but, getting back to the New Yorker, last week's fiction piece, "Ghosts", is excellent.

1 comment:

Ernessa T. Carter said...

Actually language doesn't come easily to me, and I used to think it came easily to other people until I actually went to China and discovered that the guy that was really good at Chinese went out of his way to speak with native speakers and studied like a lot -- unlike me, who studied purely for the A and not a bit more than necessary.

There was a great Freakanomics article in the NYT a few years back that basically put forth that "true talent" might be the result of people finding something they liked, then working really, really hard at it, b/c they like it. Of course that's a social theory, but I've yet to meet a really successful person who doesn't work really hard. Even Paris Hilton works really hard. Sad but true.

So funny, b/c I, too, have only read "Extremely Loud," though I'm sure "Everything is Illuminated" is brilliant. I loved "Extremely" a lot, more and more as I get further away from it -- though I had problems with the grandmother character. So beautifully written, but her actual character motivations seemed random and convenient for the writer. It felt like Foer b/c of his youth didn't really understand her character well enough to writer her truthfully. Also, I really hate when men write women badly. It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine.

But everything else was amazing. Adore that book.