I think knowing what you cannot do is
more important than knowing what you can do.—Lucille Ball
What aspect of writing do you do well? Do you write great dialogue? Are you a natural storyteller? Do you write landscape description well or have an uncanny ability to capture telling details about people?
Do you even know? You may not—for some time, anyway.
A. Scott Berg, author of Kate Remembered and Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, says he had many weaknesses and few strengths when he started out.
"My strengths were in gathering material, researching, and interviewing skills. My weaknesses ... where to begin? I did what most beginning writers do: I imitated my favorite writers. When I wrote about Fitzgerald, I wrote these leafy paragraphs; when I wrote about Hemingway, it was short simple sentences. It was just a mess. When my editor, Tom Congdon, began to edit what was my third or fourth draft of Max Perkins, he circled an entire paragraph and said, 'You know who this sounds like? Nobody! This is your voice! Write like that.' The lightbulb went off."
So what should you do—press toward your strengths and do more of what you do really well, or focus on weaknesses?
Novelist and short story writer Aimee Bender says, "Push toward your strengths because if you can exaggerate your strengths, that push toward yourself is a movement toward voice. There's something really core about the idea of writers discovering their voice. You go toward what you love about reading and you go toward what you love in your own writing. And once you get more confident at that, you take on the things that are harder, the things you're not as good at, because it will expand the breadth of your work. But there's a time for that and if you go to it at the wrong time, you almost spread yourself too thin. You don't want to dilute what is the natural bent of your work."
New writers almost always want to do what they're not that great at, perhaps imagining that real writers can do everything. It's not true. No writer does it all.
"As you go along, if you're going to continue and become a professional, you will identify the things you can do and the things you can't do," says Kate Braverman. "I was really a poet who could write dialogue. Conventional narrative has always been a weak point for me, so I learned to deal with strengths, which are language and sensory detail. I worked on those things and developed a capacity to sustain, the stamina.
"Find out what you can do, do it until you drop—you'll probably have to learn a few other things—and stay away from what you can't do."
Writing is not a triathlon. You don't have to master each writing skill or technique, no matter what your high school teachers and college professors told you. Because of spelling programs on the computer, you (unfortunately) don't even have to spell well to be a writer these days. How's that for freedom?
You need to know what you do well. If you don't know, sit down for fifteen minutes and write a few paragraphs on what you think you do well, being as specific as possible, or make a list: "I hear dialogue in my head and I write it down as I hear it." "I love to create characters and feel they come alive on the page."
Then take what you consider one of your best pieces of writing and show your writing buddy or your writing group. Ask what they think your strong points are. Where their opinions and yours converge is where your strengths lie.
Press on with your strengths. Don't veer away from them until you feel confident enough to undertake a new challenge. If narrative is your strong suit, when you write a story, make it narrative heavy. If it's dialogue, write as much dialogue as you can.
Play to your strength. And your strengths will nourish you.