Journalism is one of the few remaining careers where a qualification isn’t the be all and end all; even if you don’t have a Bachelor of Communications you can probably still land a job if you show an editor you have writing talent.
I’ve been a professional magazine editor for 15 years, and I can tell almost immediately whether a would-be writer has the talent to succeed. Recently, we had a work experience kid join us for a week and I had a fairly lengthy discussion with him about what he could expect from a career in journalism. He had asked to do work experience with us because much of what we write about concerns cars, so I then asked him what areas of motoring most interested him. He said performance engines, so I said, “Right, you’re going to put together a story on the top five engines of all time.”
I saw a light go on inside his head. He smiled and said to me, “I have a few ideas already.” As I outlined what I wanted, he became excited. He sounded and looked like a writer.
I just prayed he could write.
Well, a few days later he turned in his story. It was rough around the edges, but it was serviceable. This kid knew how to construct a sentence and he also knew how to hook a reader with interesting language. I couldn’t believe he was only 17 years old.
“Actually, I’m 16,” he told me.
When I got up off the floor I told him he had raw writing talent, and that if he kept working at it he could certainly have a journalism career. He seemed chuffed, and I know I was. Finding talent in others is often more joyous than discovering it in yourself.
The flipside is this: not everyone who wants to be a writer is cut out for it. I have dealt with writing hopefuls who are literally hopeless; they could write a thousand words a day for a thousand weeks and never come up with anything publishable.
The problem is that while there are practical lessons you can teach a prospective writer – avoid passive voice, limit your use of adverbs and adjectives, hook the reader at the start of the story, omit needless words – there is also a more intangible element to writing that can’t be taught. I call this the musicality of language.
Over years of practise, a talented writer will begin to develop an ear for prose. As he runs a sentence through his head, he can ‘hear’ whether it works or not. This is sometimes referred to with the vague term ‘balanced prose’. Grammar is part of it but certainly not all of it. Words arranged a certain way sound good; the same words arranged another way do not. Let me offer a concrete example of what I mean from a short story I’m currently working on:
A
Then he clucked his tongue, shook his head and walked away.
B
Then he shook his head, clucked his tongue and walked away.
It’s a simple descriptive sentence, but I would take version A over version B any day. One reason for its superiority is the way its actions are arranged. The cluck of a tongue translates to “I’m annoyed” and the shake of the head translates to “I can’t believe this”. Put them together and the character is tacitly saying, “I’m annoyed with you. I can’t believe this.” In version B, however, he would be saying, “I can’t believe this. I’m annoyed with you.” Which of course is doesn’t make any sense. It’s a matter of observing and understanding human shorthand and reproducing it in the correct order.
But perhaps more important is the interaction of sounds. I believe the hard K sounds of ‘clucked’ and ‘walked’ clash when they are so close together. In version A, the softer H sounds of ‘shook his head’ separate them and create a more pleasing tune for the reader’s ear (even with the ‘K’ sound in ‘shook’).
It might seem like a small thing, but it’s not. Even the simplest tune played on a piano will jag on the listener’s ear if the notes are out of sequence. A good musician can not only recognise when notes are out of sequence, he can also arrange notes in such a way that they become music. That’s what makes him a musician.
The same goes for writing. The greatest word musician I have ever come across is Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, In Cold Blood). In nothing I’ve read of his has he ever played a sour note. His ear was just about perfect. Now, not every good writer has Capote’s talent, but the line edit of a story or novel is about listening to the music you laid down with your word processor and ensuring it is as close to a symphony as you can get it.
And if you can’t hear the musicality of words, you’re probably best pursuing a career in public relations or business, where churning out tangled, tuneless language - where cacophony - is the order of the day.