I’ve identified five ingredients that go into creative writing; talent, education, examples, practice, and life experiences. I wonder if and how everyone’s recipe for writing is different. So I am wondering, what’s your recipe for writing?
A talent for writing is an ability you’re born with enabling you to put words, sentences, paragraphs and stories together in a coherent manner. It’s the wellspring of inspiration, as well as the steel spring that drives you to write. Many people have stories in their head, but it takes a special talent to bring those stories out, find the words to fit them, and then, set them down – all the way to the end – without it being a class assignment.
Education can be a university MFA degree, college or night school courses taken, seminars attended in person or online, and/or reading and studying how-to-do books or articles on writing. Education offers a tool set of established conventions and techniques that can enhance, expand, and shape one’s intrinsic talent to write.
Examples are what I call the books, movies, and TV shows we’ve read, viewed and enjoyed which have informally informed our concepts of what storytelling is all about. These are sources of education and inspiration that we unconsciously absorb and inform the way we write. While we may absorb certain aspects of styles and subjects, they are not read as text books, though I suppose one can study them as such.
Practice is simply what we’ve learned about writing from writing, writing, writing, and writing over the hours, years, or decades we’ve done it.
Life experiences are what we bring to our writing from what we’ve experienced in living our real lives. It may also include the experiences of others that we have observed in our life. I’ve also placed mundane real world considerations, like having the place, the time, and the energy to write, as well as the tools to write, under this heading.
If you can think of any other ingredients that contribute to your ability to write, please feel free to include them. The question I have for you, dear readers, is what’s your recipe? Can you estimate the share of each of these ingredients in your writing? I expect that it varies from writer to writer and I’m certain other writers would be interested to see the different approach we take to do the one thing we all do.
To get the ball rolling, I’d say that, for me, I believe that talent accounts for 50% of my writing. I’m a big believer in talent. I had the desire to be a writer from the time I started reading. When I started college, I signed up as a journalism major. I wanted to learn to write, not read old books. But I realized that I was too shy to interview people, and decided that if I had the talent, I could write, and if I didn’t, education would not make up for the lack of it. So I switched majors and took my chances. I feel the same way today, some 50 plus years later. Talent is king.
For me, education only accounts for 5%. I took an agriculture journalism course in college, and later, a written communications class in night school when I was thinking of getting a certificate in technical writing. Neither of them had any influence on my writing. The 5% comes from just one class, the most useful class I ever took; my high school typing class. Learning to touch type on manual typewriters has been something I’ve used all my life. Of course you can write novels by hand, or by hunting and pecking, but being able to touch type makes getting ideas into words almost seamless. It’s only 5%, but It’s an important 5%.
Examples accounts for maybe 20% of my writing. I’ve read several thousand novels over the last 60 years and while they have certainly influenced my writing style, I don’t consciously try to imitate any particular writer or style. However, I do think they form the basis of what I think a story should be. Plus, some books, TV shows, and genre fiction have inspired me to write my own versions of their themes.
Practice probably accounts for 15% of my writing. I find it hard to tease this factor out from talent, as it is a direct expression of one’s talent. On one hand that number seems low, but on the other hand, for better or worse, I don’t see a lot of evolution in my writing over the years. Little things have gotten better; but I think I’ve always had a certain voice, and that goes back to my first adult work, some 40 years ago.
Lastly, there’s life experiences. I’m left with 10% to allocate to my life experiences. I don’t think I’m skimping too much in this category. Thankfully, I’ve lived a nice uneventful life, so my real life plays no part in my writing. The 10% in this category comes from the tools and time of life that I now enjoy; which is to say the time retirement has given me to write, and the computer – with spell checking, – that I use to write, as well as the internet, ebooks, and the self publishing opportunities that living in the 21st century has provided. All these things have made writing so much easier. I’ve written a novel and a long novella on a manual typewriter, and when I was working, so I know it is possible to do without all these modern inventions, but they never got published, and it is unlikely that I would have written what I have published, without computers, ebooks, and the prospect of self publishing my work, making effort worthwhile.
So my recipe is 50% talent, 5% education, 20% influences, 15% practice, and 10% life, which should add up to 100% if I got my math right. Now, what is your recipe?
Writers Supporting Writers 
this is a really interest post, thanks for the idea of a “recipe” of writing
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My recipe differs depending on which stage of my writing career I’m thinking of. Right now, it’s 40% writing, 15% education, 15% examples, 15% talent, and 15% life experiences.
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Thank you for your insight. I can see how over time practice perfects the art. Though I think that you feel writing is more of a skill learned than innate skill than I do. But that’s just what I was wondering; do writers become writers out of different interests, skills, and circumstances.
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You’re welcome. I think I have stories inside me, but I needed to be taught how to make them live on the page for readers. (I also taught writing for a number of years.)
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I’d say for me it’s about 30% talent, 5% education, 50% influences, 10% practice, and 5% life. I have next to no formal training in writing, and not that much practice. Also, my life is pretty boring, so I don’t think my experiences contribute much.
But, I love telling stories, and have ever since I was a young boy. And, I’ve read a lot of books and seen a lot of movies and TV shows, (not to mention video games); and these frequently inspire me to try my hand at writing something. In fact, I think a big part of what spurs me on is reading a book or seeing a film and thinking, “Heck, I could do better than that!”
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Where does that desire to tell stories come from? I have to believe you’re born with it. I still have hand written stories I wrote in my youth. If I’d written them when I was 8 they’d be brilliant. But I wrote them when I was 13 – on lined note paper, and I didn’t write all the way to the right to up my page count. I’m no protégée. And I also have written stories with the idea that I could do it better, or at least differently.
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An interesting question, Chuck. For me, the ingredients are: Reading, Writing, Critiques by Others, Talent, and Life Experience, in the following proportions: 40%, 30%, 10%, 10%, 10%. I’ve taken very few writing courses and read almost no books about how to do it, but lots of blog posts, many of which I disagreed with. 🙂
Decades of reading all kinds of stuff inspired me to start writing. I guess I have some talent, because my books have turned out OK (says she, haha). Critiques and beta-reads by fellow writers have been helpful, and I have drawn upon personal experiences and views while writing. And you’re right–learning touch-typing was crucially important; I don’t think anyone realized in the 1970s how useful it would be. At the time I was thinking about having to type papers in college, but here I am using that skill every day, for all kinds of things.
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You know, Audrey, I never considered critiques as an ingredient, but I can certainly see how it would be. In my case, other than my wife leaving notes on the paper copy she proof reads, my other beta readers rarely offer many, if any suggestions. When they do, I try to address their concerns. I suspect that critiques are a very valid way of developing as a writer, if you’re blessed, or cursed, with thoughtful critics.
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I see critiques as a form of education. They are not like a formal course, but reactions to one’s writing by thoughtful readers who are also writers is much the same as one would get in a classroom situation. I’ve been lucky to have good crit groups and beta readers. For my most recent book I asked for volunteer beta readers through my blog. Six helpful people stepped up and offered some good advice.
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5% talent, 5% education, 5% influences, 5% life, 80% practice.
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What you describe as talent I think of as a bit differently. I think of it as intuition. For some people, writing is a natual thing that comes somewhat automatically. Call it talent or intuition, but I think we’d be talking about the same thing.
It’s an interesting thing for me to think about since I only started writing fiction in my late 30s. For much of my life before then I hated writing and thought I wasn’t any good at it. And honestly, for much of the last 5-10 years, I have struggled with it in somewhat the same vein. My inner critic is BAAAAACK!!!
But for that period of time when I wrote a lot and enjoyed it, I’d say that my recipe was 50% reading, 25% intuition/talent, 15% Writing, and 10% Life Experience.
Other than going to a couple of writing conferences, I’ve never had any formal insitruction in writing, other than what one gets in a public school education, which for me was so formulaic and boring I just can’t imagine that I learned very much that helps towards creative writing. So, I consider reading which I have done since the day I first learned to read (I always am reading. Always.) to have been my education in how to write a story. Then, next important is what you describe — some people are just born with something and I think that is the second most important ingredient. Somewhere, somehow I acquired a talent for this. And then Writing — 20 years of writing has to have taught me something that informs what I write now. And then Life Experience because elements of my stories come from my experiences.
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I think intuition and talent are the same thing as well, because you can’t put your finger on just what it is, and you can take any credit for it. I would’ve given reading a higher score myself, but when I thought of all the other ingredients, it was hard to fit them all in. Still, like you, it was from reading that I learned how to tell a story, so reading was critical. I think that for younger writers who lack the number and range of books read, formal or informal education sort of makes up for the lack of books read – which is why you see all these how-to-write posts on the internet. And some people take them to heart.
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100% Desire. Everything else follows that.
If you have the drive, the insatiable yearning to write creatively, you’ll seek to acquire the other attributes.
But given the desire is there, I’d say the formulation of one’s one style is the key. It’s rarely a direct intent: “I’m going to create my style in order to write”. It’s more a “I’m dumb as a rock, so I’ll learn what I have to to write my stories the way I want them to be written.” If what comes from that process is a return to formal learning or the exhaustive immersion into other stories; maybe the field research in exotic locations, so be it. Aside from those, intentional, mindful practice is prolly the best tool for learning to write well, in my opinion.
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We are no doubt talking about the same thing, but I’d say that the desire to write and tell stories spring from the talent we are born with. And as you say, everything flows from that, differently in different people, time of life, and experiences.
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So, if you’re not born with talent, you can’t learn to write?
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Is talent necessary to write fiction is a good question. I see talent as the ability to think creatively, both in the macro sense of constructing a story out of wordless ideas, and in the micro sense of selecting and stringing words together in entertaining, evocative, and thoughtful ways to make the events of the story seem real in the reader’s mind. Certainly the mechanics of this are taught and learned in a variety of ways, but without that spark of creativity which I see as talent, I think the result will be nondescript, at best. And if the results are great, then the writer has talent. A nice circular argument. Still, in the end, I believe that talent plays an important part in many facets of life, including writing fiction.
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I would say that for me, a sixth would be developmental editing, but maybe that fits in with practice. I would say 10% talent, 20% education, 15% developmental editing, 25% examples, 5% life experience, and practice 25%. I don’t think raw talent every contributes more than 10% to success, but it is a vital 10%.
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Thanks for contributing to the conversation. I was pretty certain that there would be many different recipes, since writers, the way we write, and the works we create are very diverse Plus, we often start from different starting points.
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