This evening I told a young lady studying at my alma mater that writing is a profession where passion must take second place to skill. I hadn’t really meant to take that stand. It was simply that, as I considered the literary profession in the light of what I’m doing now and what I’ve been doing for the last three, six, twelve and sixteen years respectively, I came to the sobering realization that passion alone isn’t enough to sustain a career.
Perhaps it’s just me; like a short-tempered version of the proverbial married couple, I suffer what’s best described as the two-year itch. Give me two years in a line of work or study and I’ll master all the intricacies needed, then lose interest and start looking for something else to do. (I suppose this makes me the next thing to unemployable?) More distressingly, this applies to a lot of my hobbies as well, although the lifespan of those is rather more varied. After a while, something in my brain goes click, as if to say: Hey. You. You know as much about this as you need to. Time to move on.
For whatever reason, anyway, I found my thoughts suddenly moving to the concept of passion, and how cliched – or overrated – it can be when applied to certain types of work. Especially work that requires skill.
It may come as a surprise to many people that writing is an activity which genuinely does require a modicum of skill, or perhaps more. It seems very easy, after all, to sit down in front of a keyboard and flood the screen with your thoughts – because it is. (Note that I say keyboard and screen; fifteen years ago I would have said pen and paper.) But it turns out that there’s a reason for the quote “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure” (Samuel Johnson).
Because it’s not so easy to cast your thoughts in a way that your readers can understand and sympathize with (or react to). Because it takes effort to organize your argument such that it makes sense to people who are different from you. Because it’s outright difficult to come up with an argument in the first place, one that can be explained and supported and adorned with the decorative flourishes of narrative and style and tone. And before the fiction writers jump in to say that a novel does not require an argument, consider this: Tolkien never claimed to be making an anti-nuclear argument when he wrote ‘The Lord of the Rings’, but there exists nonetheless an undertone of great power equating to great corruption (among a lot of other things), and you don’t need the Fat Man to make that into a debate of its own.
There are many, many passionate writers out there, people who adore their craft and are willing to sacrifice time, effort, money, emotional turmoil and artistic distress for it. Among a lot of other things. And they will tell you that they love what they are doing, and mean it. But if passion alone could lead to success, Romeo and Juliet wouldn’t have ended up dead.
Which writers succeed? Well, there’s the American guy of whom it’s said that he could publish his laundry list and it would be a bestseller (hint: Pennywise.) There’s the English Bard who came up with the Montagues and the Capulets from the previous paragraph’s example, and I seriously doubt he was writing for passion alone, because he had to make a living off it – but four centuries after his death, people are still studying his works in the hopes of making a living off their studies some day. I greatly dislike the study of literature because in my opinion, it analyses too much – for all you know, a “poetic” passage was just some stream of consciousness trash spouted in an attempt to relieve an attack of writer’s block. But all that annoying analysis did show me one thing – that there is some genuine underlying technical and mechanical skill involved in writing of any kind.
With that skill, you can express your passion – and if you don’t have passion, you can fake it. Ask any sex worker.
With passion, you can do great things with your skill – but if you don’t have skill, what you can do is severely limited.
I am not knocking people with passion. Everything has to start somewhere. But I worry every time I hear someone say that they want to do/are doing something out of passion, and then go on to blithely reveal that they lack any basic knowledge of what they’re doing. If they can develop skill, good for them. But I’ve also seen a lot of people who never do bother to develop skill – in fact, who don’t even seem to recognize that they need to develop skill, and who go through life in the certainty that their passion will win out somehow.
I hope it does, because everyone ought to have a chance to do something that they’re passionate about. But at the same time, part of me looks through piles and piles of manuscripts (including my own) and shelf after shelf of self-published books (also including my own) and page after page after page of blogs (again including my own) and that part of me thinks: take your passion and stuff it.
