August 8, 2005
Just a brief note before I go on about writing arrogance. After having commented that my website was a mess, several people posted to say they agreed. So, despite a lack of technical proficiency and some very annoying incompatibility issues between my computer and my updated software and even more annoying incompatibility issues with my updated software and my host servers extensions, I managed to clean up the site a bit. Check it out and complain about the background color or something to make sure I'm consistent in my website design abilities. I'm still planning to have it professional revamped this fall, Visa willing.

Now, on to arrogance. Let's ruffle a few feathers this week. I got involved in a complicated thread on Lee Goldberg's blog this weekend, but it made me consider a few things, so here goes:

When I was a senior in high school, I started teaching piano and saxophone. At that time I had taught sax occasionally, and I had been taking piano for about 9 or 10 years and was pretty good. I was also unbelievably cheap, at $3 per half hour--this was in 1981 or 1982--or $3.50 if I came to your home. By the time I was done I had 20 students, and this was better at $6 or $7 an hour than the $3.35 I made at Burger King (which I hated). My brother had his degree in music, and given my parents' constant bitchin' about that while he was in school, I had no strong desire to go and become a music major. Besides, although I was a modestly talented pianist (classical piano), and I absolutely loved playing, I wasn't an idiot. I wasn't talented enough to become a classical pianist. If I had majored in music I would have ended up a band director who played piano (or worse, organ) for a church on Sunday, or taught piano students from 3:30 in the afternoon until 10:00 at night and all day on Saturday. I didn't want that. So I took private lessons my first year in college, never touched the saxophone again, and after that year got involved in other things and never really went back. If I had been as passionate about sax as I had been about piano, it's possible I could have made a living playing jazz or being a session musician somewhere, but I never really had that kind of passion for the sax. I liked playing, I was above average for a high school student, but I never really worked at it.

My aunt is a talented painter. Talented by my standards, anyway. Loves to paint roses on china, and has done at least one landscape that to my eyes is quite good.

I've got this friend in town, Gino, who plays organized softball. He's really into it. Not just pickup softball, but uniforms and all that.

My friend Judy loves to sing in her church choir.

Here's my point. Thousands, maybe millions of people around the world, love to play the piano, play the guitar, sing, paint, play baseball, football, soccer. And in the majority of cases, not once do they think they're going to do it for money or for a living or even do it for a living and strike it rich.

That isn't to say there aren't people who do think so, as American Idol has so dramatically and annoyingly demonstrated. There are plenty of self-deluded folks out there.

So why does every person who's ever sat at their computer and hacked out a short story, magazine article, novel or screenplay automatically assume not only that they're going to get published, but that they're going to make not just a living doing this, but that they're going to get a 6-figure advance or pop on the New York Times Bestseller List or have their script picked up for a million bucks and the movie starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt is going to get made and be the hottest movie around? Why do would-be writers (or, gulp, "pre-published"--God, I hate that word!) always aspire to professional levels and then not just professional levels, but to levels of professional super stardom?

I suspect some of that is arrogance. "Hey," they think, "I've known how to write since I was in first or second grade. I've got a great story to tell. My story's better than that Stephen King schmuck's. All the critics say he's a hack anyway. I can do better, see?"

An awful lot of people think the only thing they have to do to make a story great is run their spellchecker and grammar checker. That professional writers of all sorts don't bring something else--like years and years of refining their technique, understanding the business, building a readership, understanding nuances about characterization, pacing, dialogue, story structure, etc--to the job than they do. I can attest to this fact: it takes years and years of writing to develop the kind of objectivity it requires to know what's wrong with your own writing. And that's just the beginning.

That isn't to say there aren't talented folks who scribble something off, get published, get rich, etc. But really, there's more to it than just being able to string a few sentences together without a misspelling.

Best,
Mark Terry