Is it true that some people are just natural-born writers?
The myth of the natural writer suggests that some people are simply born with a talent for writing. On the opposite end of this myth is the suggestion others are naturally bad writers.
Let’s dig into this.
We’ll start with a simple definition of writing. We could say writing is the act of putting words on a page and we wouldn’t be wrong, but we’re going to land at a much more unusual definition. Writing is a technology. We’re not talking about the pens, the paper, or the laptop we use to write, writing itself is a technology. As a technology, writing is all about using symbols (letters, words, punctuation) to stand in for actual things and meanings.
While speech is natural (parents instinctively teach it and children instinctively learn it), writing is different story. Our instincts don’t guide us to learn writing because it’s a technology that we can learn but not because it’s part of our biology. Not only is writing a technology, but it’s a technology with a lot of difficulties and limitations.
Take grammar and spelling for instance. With a boatload of complicated, inconsistent, and difficult rules, your ability to write within those rules depends on how well you can navigate hundreds of years of hodge-podge rules where correctness is often determined just by who is reading it. At the end of the day, the good writers aren’t born with semi-colons on the brain, they’re the ones who have been exposed to the rules of writing and have learned to navigate them well.
If writing feels unnatural for you, that’s because writing IS unnatural.
When we look at writing this way, you can see that it’s not your fault if writing feels foreign or awkward. A handful of the blame for that goes to teachers and school administrators. Poor writing instruction – the kind that teaches a standardized test version of communicating – teaches a lot of the wrong rules of the technology. Focusing on essay structures and incomprehensible grammar rules makes writing into a mechanical chore.
While some people can thrive with this instruction, others find it difficult to work within the rules and actually make something that means something.
In other words our writing education doesn’t create natural writers and unnatural ones, it makes students who can work with the rules easily and students who can’t. Now I think we can safely say that the myth of natural-born writers is busted.
