 N Foster
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Posted: 2/12/2004; 3:22:05 PM 
TEXT FOR THE DAY
Everybody Is Talented, Original and Has Something Important to Say
I have been writing a long time and have learned something, not only from my own long hard work, but from a writing class I had for three years. In this class were all kinds of people: prosperous and poor, stenographers, housewives, salesmen, cultivated people and little servant girls who had never been to high school, timid people and bold ones, slow and quick ones.
This is what I learned: that everybody is talented, original and has something important to say.
And it may comfort you to know that the only people you might suspect of not having talent are those who write very easily and glibly, and without inhibition or pain, skipping gaily through a novel in a week or so. these are the only ones who did not seem to improve much, to go forward. You cannot get much out of them. They give up working presently and drop out. But these, too, were talented underneath. I am sure of that. It is just that they did not break through the shell of easy glibness to what is true and alive underneath,--just as most people must break through a shell of timidity and strain.
Everybody Is Talented
Everybody is talented because everybody who is human has something to express. Try not expressing anything for twenty-four hours and see what happens. You will nearly burst. You will want to write a long letter or draw a picture or sing, or make a dress or a garden. Religious men used to go into the wilderness and impose silence on themselves, but it was so that they would talk to God and nobody else. Bur they expressed something: that is to say they had thoughts welling up in them and the thoughts went out to someone, whether silently or aloud.
Writing or painting is putting these thoughts on paper. Music is singing them. That is all there is to it.
Everybody Is Original
Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his true self and not from the self he thinks he should be. Jennings at Johns Hopkins, who knows more about heredity and the genes and chromosomes than any man in the world, says that no individual is exactly like any other individual, that no two identical persons have ever existed. Consequently, if you speak or write from yourself you cannot help being original.
So remember these two things: you are talented and you are original. Be sure of that. I say this because trust is one of the very most important things in writing...
This creative power and imagination is in everyone and so is the need to express it, i.e., to share it with others.
Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write, ©1938, Graywolf Press, 1987
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Whew. You know, I'm glad this came after the Learned Imitation entry. Otherwise, it just have been depressing to go from having talent and originality to following the mold and lacking originality.
At any rate. I really liked this article. Finally some hope that my slowness with writing will pay off in the end, with a chance that I might improve more than the folks that are naturally speedy.
Wow. That would be nice.
(more later)
-n.
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