A Personality Paradox—Why Good Writers Are Rare

People who can write as well as I do are extremely uncommon.

Have I got your attention? I just said something I wasn’t supposed to say. No one gets to say things like this. It’s bad form. I put twelve words together and you may have cringed. If you are, like many people, incapable of separating skill assessment from personal opinion, you’ll probably find or invent six reasons why I’m a bad writer. You won’t even be wrong. I’m a serious writer (investment in craft is mostly objective) but… as for whether I’m a good writer? Well, I’d be the last one to know. If you don’t like what I write, then for you I am not a good writer.

Why are great, serious writers so rare, though? IQ isn’t the barrier; it couldn’t be, because excellent writers are so much rarer than high IQs—140 is probably more than sufficient, but a million American adults reach or exceed that level, and the number of ferocious writers is… not that. Some unmeasurable creative talent? Maybe, but how confident are we that creativity is a talent? The unskilled kind, in children, is not rare; I suspect that time and intelligence suffice to refine it to the skilled kind. Could it be a lack of incentive? This is the strongest claim so far, because writing is one of the least lucrative ends toward which a sharp mind can be put, but I don’t think this explains all of it. Prestige is as much a motivator as financial gain, and plenty of very gifted people wish they could write at the highest levels, though few do. We all use language, so why is excellence so uncommon? I think I know the answer.

Some people are arrogant. Some people are humble. Very few would be described using both traits, but this paradoxical combination is a prerequisite for excellent creative work. You won’t be able to sustain an artistic vision unless you believe you can do things almost no one can, but you won’t be able to keep your skills in top form unless you’re constantly learning. You must solicit insight from everywhere—a cab driver might be your next teacher—but throw 99 percent of it out.

Religion used to play this role. At its best, it encourages this paradoxical cultivation—enough sense of individual importance to live as if one’s moral decisions truly matter; enough humility before God to avoid diverging into narcissism. In today’s neoliberalism, there is no room for this nuance. The wealthy and connected are not “like gods” in the market religion—they are its gods, for they hold the keys to secular heaven. The rest of us, with follower counts and financial holdings three to six orders of magnitude smaller, are numerically proven nothings. The system ranks you, and that’s what you are. You must be humble if your drawn lot is to survive a subordinate position. You must be arrogant, if a superior role has been given to you, to keep it; never show weakness. You must pull traits from one assigned column; none from the other will be tolerated.

A balanced personality would cause confusion. People struggle with those they cannot size up. Still, it is a necessity if you want to develop and sustain the ability to write. If you have the slightest self-doubt, the publishing world will use it against you. This starts with the query system, a blunt insult cloaked in necessary expediency: Reduce your work to a 300-word pitch that a failed author will reject in the second sentence if the first one isn’t “hooky” enough. It only gets worse once you get a book deal and have something to lose. “We need you to cut 60,000 words” (to reduce printing costs.) “Our sensitivity reader found your setting problematic” (and we won’t defend you against online outrage.) “Reduce your character’s age to make her more marketable” (because you aren’t too good for the market, because we’ve decided no one is.) It takes diamantine self-opinion not to cave in. You must secretly think you’re better than every single one of the people who will try to cut you down. You must believe you are seen by something greater than yourself, but this requires faith that such an entity exists.

For balance, you need to be the sort of person who uses the dictionary to look up words you “mostly know” in order to refine nuance. You should use adverbs, but audit every single one, and cut half of them (adverbs read weirdly; when does an intensifier diminish?) in your second draft. You need to look everywhere for new techniques, including those that violate the rules of the old ones. Most people, once they achieve recognition, lose this capacity for unflinching self-critique. A year of institutional support, and humility is gone. Giftedness isn’t enough; reputation often proves to be a nursing home.

I suspect, also, that every serious writer is neurodivergent, not in any specific clinical sense, but on account of social resistance. The deliriant effects of social status, whether low or high, are so potent over typical people that objective reality’s traces and shades don’t stand a chance. Few people have the chutzpah to develop before recognition is conferred; fewer still are grounded enough to withstand fame once it comes. Yet full immunity to society’s effects also seems incompatible, at least in fiction, with excellent writing. How could a person write about living with other humans without having suffered? One must be vulnerable, but not susceptible—another paradoxical pair. I don’t know if this one can be cultivated; I know even less if it would be a good idea. This suggests it’s a hard thing to know. But maybe someone does?