(D) Minutes after the sun cleared the market wall, foot-prints roughened the dust. Tent posts swung up; canvas slid down. Along the counters women laid out trowels and tomato rakes, pumpkins and pecan pickers. Jenny ambled from under the sandal stall awning. At the corner well she picked up a steel dipper chained to the mossy stones for a cold drink. As it chilled her teeth and throat, water dripped on her toes.
Talented writing tends to contain more information, sentence for sentence, clause for clause, than merely good writing. Example D exhibits a variety of sentence lengths. Yes, the images arrive in chronological order. But more than that, the passage paints its picture through specifics. It also employs rhetorical parallels and differences. (“Tent posts swung up; canvas slid down.”) It pays attention to the sounds and rhythms of its sentences (“trowels and tomato rakes, pumpkins and pecan pickers”). It uses detailed sensory observation (the drink chills “her teeth and throat”). Much of the information it proffers is implied. (In D that includes both the bustle and the fact that we are in a market!) These are among the things that indicate talent.
I do not hold up D as a particularly good (or particularly talented!) piece of writing, but it shows a rhetorical awareness, a balance, a velocity, a particularity, and a liveliness that puts it way ahead of the others. Above and beyond the fact that they are logically or illogically organized, versions A through C are, by comparison, bland, formulaic, and dull. What distinguishes the writers of A, B, and C is, in fact, how good each is. But D alone shows a scrap of talent—and only a scrap.
Good writing avoids stock phrases and received language. Talented writing actively laughs at such phrases, such language. When talented writing and good writing support one another, we have the verbal glories of the ages—the work of Shakespeare, Thomas Browne, Joyce, and Nabokov.
Talented writing and good writing sometimes fight. The revisions necessary to organize the writing and unclutter it can pare away the passages or phrases that give the writing its life. As often, what the writer believes is new and vivid is just cliché confusion. From within the precincts of good writing, it’s easy to mistake talent’s complexity for clutter. From within the precincts of talent, it’s easy to mistake the clarity of good writing for simplicity—even simple-mindedness. Critics or editors can point the problems out. The way to solve them, however, is a matter of taste. And that lies in the precincts of talent.
III
The early German Romantics—Schiller (1759–1805), the Schlegel brothers, Wilhelm (1767–1845) and Friedrich (1772–1829), and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), that is, the smart Romantics—believed something they called Begeisterung was the most important element among the processes that constituted the creative personality.
I think they were right.
Begeisterung is usually translated as “inspiration.” Geist is the German word for “spirit,” and “Be-geist-erung” means literally “be-spirited-ness,” which is certainly close to “inspiration.” As the word is traditionally used in ordinary German, though, it is even closer to “enthusiasm”—“spirited” in the sense of a “spirited” horse or a “spirited” prizefighter. For the Romantics, Begeisterung was not just the initial idea or the talent one had to realize it. Begeisterung was both intellectual and bodily. A form of spirit, it was also a mode of will. To the Romantics, this enthusiasm/Begeisterung carried the artist through the work’s creation. If there were things you didn’t know that you needed in order to write your story, your novel, your play, with enough Begeisterung you could always go out and learn them. If your imagination wasn’t throwing out the brilliant scenes and moments to make the material dramatic, with Begeisterung you could arrive at such effective material through dogged intelligence, though it might take longer and require more energy. If you lacked the verbal talent that produced vivid descriptive writing, well, there were hard analytic styles that were also impressive, which you could craft through intellectual effort—though you would have to attack the work sentence by sentence. But however you employed it, Begeisterung is what carried you through the job. Begeisterung could make up for failures on other creative fronts.
Begeisterung is what artists share over their otherwise endless differences: enthusiasm for a task clearly perceived.
Over the range of our society the artist’s position is rarely a prosperous one—certainly not in the beginning stages and often never. The increased size of the new, democratic field that today produces both readers and writers, the increase in competition for fame and attention—not to mention the increased effort necessary to make a reasonable living from one’s work—all transform a situation that was always risky into one that today often looks lunatic. Begeisterung/enthusiasm is about the only thing that can get the artist through such a situation.
The decision to be a writer is the decision to enter a field where most of the news—most of the time—is bad. The best way to negotiate this situation is to have (first) a realistic view of what that situation is and (second) considerable Begeisterung. As Freud knew, Begeisterung is fundamentally neurotic. The critic Harold Bloom has suggested that what makes artists create is rank terror before the failure to create, a failure that somehow equates with death. When the artist discovers creation can, indeed, allay that fear, it produces the situation and form of desire that manifests itself as Begeisterung. When, from time to time throughout the artist’s life, Begeisterung fails, often terror lies beneath.
Having mentioned the basic importance of Begeisterung, I’ll go on to outline another use.
Let me describe two students in a midwestern graduate creative writing workshop I taught once. One was a young man of twenty-six from a solidly middle-class background, who had entered the university writing program with extremely good marks and high scores on his GREs (Graduate Record Exams). From the general discussion of the student stories we analyzed in the workshop, clearly he was an intelligent and sensitive critic. Certainly he was among the smartest and the most articulate of the students in the group. He was not particularly interested in publishing, however, and in a discussion during which I asked students what they wanted to do with their writing and where they saw themselves going, he explained that he wanted to improve his writing and eventually publish a collection of stories in a university series that was committed to doing graduate student and junior faculty work. He had no particular series in mind but was sure one such existed, which would accept his work, preferably without reading it, purely because some other writer—perhaps a workshop teacher—had judged him personally “ready for publication.” When I told him I knew of no such series, nor had I any personal criteria for “publishability” other than finding a given story a rewarding and pleasurable read, he was not at all bothered. If such a series did not exist now, he was sure that in four or five years it would—because that was the right and proper way the world should work. Through continuing in workshops, he would eventually get his chance. If he didn’t, finally it didn’t matter. He felt no desire to have his work appear from a large commercial press, however, or from a small press only interested in supporting work it judged of the highest quality. As soon as any sort of competitive situation arose, he felt there must go along with it some bias based on nonesthetic aspects—actually an interesting theory, I thought. Though he sincerely wanted to improve his work for its own sake, he felt, when and if his work was published, it should be published because there was a place that published work such as his and it would simply be, so to speak, his turn. Competition, he believed and believed deeply, was not what art was about. He articulated this position well. The other students in the class were all impressed with his commitment to it—as, in fact, was I.
Myself, I had seen no evidence of what I could recognize as talent in his writing, however, and his stories struck me as a series of banal romances in which the hero either discovered his girlfriend was cheating on him and left her sadly, or another girl began an affair with a hero recently cheated on and stuck to him despite his gloom. They were well written, in precisely the sense I describe above, but they were without color or life—and always in the present tense. That made them, he explained, sound more