Four Unexpected Traits of Great Writers and Artists

they don't talk about these in the writing books

I’ve read plenty of books on writing over the years, and found most of them helpful in some way or another. They do what they can, anyway. But I’ve also felt for a long time that there are ingredients to being a writer/artist that can’t be instructed because they are more like personality traits or circumstances and things that generally can’t be manufactured by willpower.

One of the first times I noticed this was in watching Peter Jackson’s docuseries “Get Back” on the Beatles’ last throes as a band together. I don’t know exactly what I thought creating some of the greatest music of all time would have looked like, so I guess it was inevitable that I was surprised when I witnessed Paul McCartney screwing around with a guitar riff, mumbling some words, and out of thin air in about two minutes we have this iconic song, “Get Back”, that I grew up with:

It’s an amazing moment not only for what it is, but for what surrounds it: lots of boredom, conflict, and chaos.

This is part of what landed me on the trail of wondering what really does make for great artistry or writing prowess, and since then over the years I’ve keyed in on a few traits that I think are universal to great artists and writers…but which, again, I’ve never seen laid out in a writing book quite in this way:

1. input

I think people vastly underestimate the amount of input a great writer/artist needs in order to create something ingenius, or even competent. I’m talking unheard of, mammoth, nearly neurotic levels of input: a competent author needs to read thousands of books. A competent musician needs to listen to thousands of albums. A competent painter needs to practice thousands of styles.

I do mean thousands. Yes, thousands. And I’m talking competence, here, not genius.

It’s something we see in “Get Back”, actually. None of the Beatles are classically trained, so it might seem counterintuitive. But something that’s clear from the docuseries is that they’ve listened to everything. Everything. We know this because they are constantly playing riffs from country, blues, rock, ragtime…whatever. They consume and take in reams and reams of material, not in the, “I’m studying this album because it is similar to what I’m trying to create” kind of way, but in a, “I am obsessively looking for music that can do something for me and I will search every crack and crevice of the universe to find it” kind of way.

And yeah, that comes across in their music. It’s original because they’ve borrowed from everything.

I can’t quite remember where I found this but someone once tried to estimate how many books C.S. Lewis read in a year based on a marginal comment he made in a letter to a friend about borrowing one whole section of the Bodleian library. Ready for it?

Three hundred. Three hundred in one year, and that was just for his research project. It didn’t even include what he calls his “gossipy” reading.

That goes for hifalutin stuff like Lewis, but it also goes for others who write competent commercial fiction. Stephen King says he reads three hours a day, and says someone unwilling to read obsessively shouldn’t think of themselves as a writer. J.K. Rowling’s prose is about perfect, but that comes from majoring in the classics and reading hundreds and hundreds of books.

This isn’t just information seeking. There is a kind of “ear/eye” you can have for great writing or music or artwork, and to train that ear/eye takes an unheard of amount of input.

The point is, if you’re going to eek out something competent, or even profound, you’ve got to get a camel of input into the eye of that needle. If you’re struggling for something to write, you have an input problem. Read more. Think more. You will not struggle for a topic if you are take in reams of input.

That doesn’t of course mean you have time to read like Lewis or Stephen King. But if you aspire to be a writer, I think one book per week is the minimum you should be reading.

2. boredom

I am convinced that one of the things the iphone did to us was destroy any potential we have to produce artistic genius. Again, looking back at the Beatles docuseries, one of the things that stands out is the sheer amount of empty space.

Nothing. Is. Happening.

There were so many moments during the series I was tempted to get out my phone. But that’s just the point. Imagine if every member of the Beatles had an iphone. What would have happened over the course of this time together? As for me and my house, I’m convinced they never would have produced “Get Back” if they were inoculated by brain rot.

I am told that boredom and creativity are shown to coincide from a neurological perspective, and I believe it. But the boredom spoken of here has to be empty boredom. It cannot be filled boredom. It has to be quiet, not buzzing in the background.

Which is why, I daresay, it must be screen-less.

This is why the shower is where you come up with your best ideas. It’s not only that nothing is happening: it is not possible for anything else to happen. Once you remove the possibility of doing anything else, that’s when your brain clicks into creative mode. Your body and your brain know there are no escape routes, so they get to work creating things. It’s the same reason you can feel the difference between interacting with somebody without a phone in sight, and interacting with someone when their phone is sitting on the table.

So where will you get this time? How can you tell your brain and body, “The screen is taboo at this time”?

3. misery

Here’s the truth of it: most artists live with a degree of misery. It’s the reason they become artists. They are trying to escape misery, understand it, process it, and help others with their own misery. Creating is coping.

A great work of art I’ve read recently is Gabrielle Zevin’s “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”. She draws from an insane amount of material, from shakespeare to YA novels to video games. In the book, one of the characters makes a comment: “Art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.”

That’s just true.

Of course I don’t want you to be miserable. And you shouldn’t try to be miserable. But the truth is, if you are miserable…be encouraged. You might just be an artist at heart. So here let me give a word to those of us who don’t really care about being “great”: if you’re miserable, create some things. It helps. Your misery can be a gift.

The Bible says something like that, doesn’t it?

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer. And our hope for you is firm, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.

- 1 Corinthians 1:3-7

Only the miserable can comfort the miserable.

This is why I believe most writers and artists peak in their 50’s: life gets hard. They’ve experienced dashed hopes, abandonment, betrayal, love lost, physical limitations…there is a degree of pain in their story that couldn’t have been there before.

I’ve often felt this when I read a book but can’t quite get into it. The writing may be fine, the storytelling fine, but I’ve so often concluded: “This person hasn’t experienced a lot of pain,” and I quietly set it aside.

Again I’m not encouraging masochism, here. This is more for those of us who have an artistic temperament, for whom survival is an act of courage: your pain means you see things and feel things that others don’t.

So create.

We need your creation.

4. obsession

This final ingredient is actually a product of the others. Great artists are obsessed with their work. They demand absolute conformity to their artistic vision. I’m sure there are neurotic and bad reasons for this. But I think one reason for this is that whenever you are creating a piece of art, you are trying to create what John Gardner calls a “fictive dream”. You are trying to do a magic trick. You are trying to help people forget they live in the world they live in. Now they live in your world.

That requires absolute obsession. There can be no inconsistencies. There can be no details that don’t matter. You have to be good enough to allow others to suspend their disbelief, and “believe”, for a minute, or an hour, or an obsessive evening of reading that your world is real.

This is where the line between artistry and sanity is very thin. Because I think there is a point where the world you’ve created comes alive. And I think this is what makes a piece of art cross into the realm of genius: the artist has actually come to believe their world is real. Every work of art must cross this threshold at some point, and at that point, the piece is ready.

Neurotic and born of misery as this may be, there is also something about the imago dei in us. Tolkien once wrote that the essence of being human was to be a “sub-creator”: God created the world, then invited us to create as well. And I cannot think of a world more “real” than Tolkien’s. Can you?

But the reason for his obsession is key: he wanted to experience the beauty of the world he created. He wanted you to experience it. And he knew that in order to do that, he had to, in some sense, really create that world.

This obsessiveness is something you’ll find in film directors, musicians and artists of all stripes. It could be about ego, sure, and maybe it always is at some level. But really, at the end of the day, this kind of obsession with detail is about creating an experience that allows us to escape from reality in order to return to it renewed, refreshed and restored.

I’d be curious to hear: do you have any unconventional “traits” you’ve seen in artists/writers you admire?