Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!
Pretty much at the moment of my birth, my mother decided that she had a writing prodigy on her hands.
The hilarious part is I didn’t actually learn how to read until I was about five, maybe six, years old. Or rather, I refused to read until then. It was a whole fight with the kindergarten teachers to just let me be. Other kids were being coached on the alphabet and sounding out words (this was the 1970s), but not KimBooBoo. I got to draw or just goof off during those lessons.
How my mother won that victory against the school administration was a story my mother told over and over again to demonstrate that she knew what was best for me no matter what the professional educators told her.
No one should be surprised when she pulled me out of the education system and started homeschooling me when I was eight.
My mother’s firm belief was that my latent talent was all I needed to succeed. At the time, I had no other options than to believe her (she was Mother after all), and so began my journey of learning without a curriculum, driven by interests and “raw talent.”
But here’s the thing: she was wrong all along.
(I dare you not to be singing that!)
Mother believed that talent would always trump skills. Since I could learn how to do anything, that was not the important part. Skills were not worth focusing on, instead, once I crossed the Rubicon of literacy, I was let loose to do pretty much whatever I wanted…as long as it was reading or writing.
I guess my homeschooling was like the old Model A advertisement that claimed you could get that model of car in whatever color you wanted as long as you painted it yourself.
(I want to make clear that I’m not slamming on the “unschool” homeschool experience. I think it is possible to raise children in an unschooled environment without simply abandoning them, it’s just what my mother did.)
Since she decided I was a writing prodigy, she expected me to live up to the designation. What this meant in practice was that I wrote. Constantly. Obsessively. Not because I had self-discipline (definitely NO) but because writing was essentially the one structured thing I was pointed at and told: go. There wasn’t much else my mother had on offer.
I filled notebooks. I started stories I never finished, finished stories I immediately threw away, and wrote the same dramatic plot beats over and over in slightly different costumes. I wrote Star Wars and Star Trek fanfiction by the ream. I wrote fake newspaper articles for an audience of zero. I wrote stories where I was the hero, the villain, the narrator, and the love interest simultaneously. Just call me “Mary Sue KimBoo”! I wrote pastiches of the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, Anne McAffrey, Vonda McIntyre, and every other author I liked.
Mother looked at all of this and saw proof of her theory: talent. She believed my innate gift was expressing itself naturally, the way a flower grows toward light.
What she didn’t see (what I did not understand until much later) was that the flower was growing because someone had been quietly, relentlessly watering it. Not with metaphysical genius. With repetition.
There’s a story I love from the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland that gets at this. A ceramics teacher divided his class into two groups on the first day. One group would be graded entirely on quantity, so their work would literally be weighed on a bathroom scale at the end of the semester, fifty pounds of pots earning an A, forty pounds a B, and so on. (Can you imagine being the kid with the pots weighing 49.8 pounds? I would riot!) The other group would be graded on quality. They only needed to produce a single pot, but it had to be perfect.
You can probably guess where this is going.
At the end of the semester, the pots which were the most technically accomplished and the most artistically interesting had all come from the quantity group. While they’d been busy making pots, screwing up, figuring out why, and making more pots, the quality group had spent the semester thinking about what a perfect pot would look like. In the end, they had, as Bayles and Orland put it, “grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”
Doing the thing, it turns out, is how you get good at the thing. Not thinking about the thing or waiting until you feel ready for the thing. The thing itself is the teacher.
My mother accidentally made me make ten thousand pots.
She thought she was nurturing a gift. And maybe she was, a little? I’m not here to argue that aptitude doesn’t exist at all, because I think it does. Some people do seem to take to certain skills more naturally than others. But aptitude without volume is just potential sitting on a shelf gathering dust. It doesn’t become skill until it gets used, over and over, until you’ve worn grooves into it. Then, and only then, does it become talent.
This is the thing I want to tell people when they compliment my writing and use the word talented, as if what they’re seeing is something I was simply born with, a coat I arrived wearing. It’s a kind thing to say but it quietly erases all the pots.
What I know now, looking back, is that talent was never the engine. Obviously I had a spark of something which was the thing that made writing feel interesting enough to keep doing it over the course of decades, but the engine was always the work itself.
If you’re a writer (or an artist, or a musician, or anyone trying to get better at a thing you care about) the best thing I can tell you to do isn’t to wait for your talent to show up or to sit with a blank page until something perfect emerges. It’s to make the pots. Write the bad first draft. Finish the messy story. Then write the next messy story.
Then, start the next one.
You don’t need to be talented to begin. You just need to begin, and then keep going.
Your talent, it turns out, takes care of itself.
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