Tradition And The Individual Talent

Three traditions are at work simultaneously inside each one of us: The Great Tradition, the Personal Tradition, and the Tradition of the Next New Thing. These three traditions work to shape us as we live our lives and work our jobs and raise our children and comfort our friends and create our art. While each is separate and distinct, one Tradition does not exist in isolation; never one without the others. Each tradition always has the sound of the others within its earshot, the color of the others within its light, the smell of the others within its own intoxicating scent. What I am writing about here is how these three traditions work within us, how they help and hinder our art making, and specifically, since I am a writer, how they help and hinder our writing. They are as natural to life as breathing and, like the breath, deserve some attention.

The Great Tradition is the tradition of the past, those millions of great writers and storysmiths all over the world throughout the ages, weaving their tales and enthralling their audiences. Some met with success in their own lifetimes, some not until long after their own deaths. Some were ridiculed and revered later, some revered then ridiculed later. However they were treated and whatever color or gender they happened to have been, God bless them, they’re dead. But they haunt us, Writers, Scholar-Critics, Theater and Literary Professionals all. Their books fill the shelves of our stores and libraries; we writers read their words often when we do not have the courage to write our own. We talk about their writing, love their words, their plots, their characters, pilfer their turns of phrases, sometimes wishing we were them, those great dead writers.

Each artist, regardless of medium or genre, who has created before us should be of use. We each have a responsibility to read and see and hear as much as we can. One year a writer may find a certain style of writing most helpful and inspiring, the next year she will undoubtedly be embracing other styles and forsaking those she once found so necessary. Not to worry. What is important is that, as we work to develop our artistic muscles, we should embrace the Great Tradition warmly and thoroughly, reading Mr. Aristotle and Mr. Soyinka, enjoying Ms. Stein along with Mr. Williams, immersing ourselves in Mr. Shakespeare as well as Ms. Shange. And cross fertilize (or “cross-train,” as they call it these days—there are more athletes today than farmers): novelists and those in the novel corner read the poets and the playwrights, playwrights and theater professionals read the novelists, and so on. Everyone, listen to the music! Mr. J. S. Bach and Ms. E. Fitzgerald and countless others can teach us as much about phrasing, rhythm, rhyme, and the breath as Mr. Euripides can. No need to snub a writer because she is not similar to you in color, gender, or age: there is no such thing as an “old white fart,” just as there is no such thing as a “marginal colored writer.” Writing styled differently from my own can teach me too: there is no need to wrinkle my nose at a “kitchen-sink drama” or a potboiler novel just because its lines seem far from mine.

The Great Tradition is an enormous sledgehammer that comes with very few operating instructions. Many writers use the hammer incorrectly—grasping it firmly by the handle (we always get the first step right) and then—horror—hitting ourselves over the head with it. Or as a student of mine said once, “I don’t write as well as Dostoyevsky, so what’s the use?” The use! Literature has inside of it what was inside its creators, which means that literature holds all three traditions, Great, Personal, and Next New Thing. Inside every great work of literature, inside every theatrical production that has moved and amazed us, there we all were and are, conceived within its every line and gesture, as part of the Next New Thing. The Great Tradition is like your great-grandmother who was born with the seed for you deep inside her. Be a John Henry with the sledgehammer, build a railroad.

The Personal Tradition (a.k.a. the Individual Talent) springs from the writer’s own life story, the sum of all her years on earth (through all her incarnations). The people she has seen, and not seen, and seen in her head, and all the things she has heard and felt, and all the things she has not heard and felt, everything she has ever done, longed to do, or has never done or longed for, the smells, the psychic experiences, all this is grist for the writer’s personal mill.

The writer is alive, the time is now. What should she write? The writer writes what interests her. There is a rule that one should write only about “what one knows,” which is often interpreted to mean that, if the writer has never been married, but has just broken up with her beau, broken beauing, and not marriage, is the suitable subject for her. Well. We “know” much more than our conscious minds think we know. We also have a gut and a reptilian brain, right at the axis, the gateway to the spine, oh, the grand knowing spine, the original information superhighway. The spine knows about all kinds of things, like back when the writer was little and had gills, so write about fish if that’s where the gut takes you. There is no need to let a “lack” of personal experience keep the writing unwritten. There is a truth that undercurrents most writing, regardless of situation or subject matter. While there are many fine poets who fought a duel a day, many playwrights who slept with all the men in the state of Texas, many novelists who rode motorcycles helmetless at high speeds, remember too that Phillis Wheatley was a slave, Anton Chekhov worked as a simple country doctor, and Marcel Proust and Emily Dickinson both hardly ever went out of the house.

So the writer writes a novel, or a play, or a bundle of poems and she is hardworking and smart enough to primarily associate with people whom she respects, and people who in turn respect her, and she is not in a rush to show her work to people whose only good point is that they may advance her career; rather, she shows her work mostly to people who care about her and have some intelligence. She may attend a specialized writing program and get a writing degree, but this is not necessary. And a degree never ensures anything. The writer works hard for several years and before long she has carved out her literary niche, carved it out of solid rock, and has what the world is beginning to refer to as a “body of work.”

Now comes the second part of the Personal Tradition, the fruit of the Individual Talent: the writer’s very own Body of Work. The Body of Work (let’s call it “BOW,” as in “Bow Wow Wow!”) is as difficult to navigate as the literature of the Great Tradition. The writer is here now. Behind her, the succulent fruit of her talent—spanning fifty years or five—with all its accolades and maybe some cash and, yes, her public, those people who have come to know her BOW. Some of them adore her, some of them may not like her so much, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that she has a body of work and a public, and her New Work is being written. With any luck her public will surround her new work and look at it and read it and love and revere or hate and despise her all the more; yeah, they will come to know the writer all the more, that is what the writer’s hopes are for the work that is growing inside her right now.

And say the writer’s name is X.

And her Body of Work is referred to as “Xish,” or better yet, “Xian.” In write-ups in newspapers and in scholarly journals, in the mouths of her public, theater professionals, scholar-critics, editors, and fans, there is forming an idea of the kind of work that Miss X writes. “Do your thing so that I may know you,” said Thoreau, and there is Miss X working and slaving and creating an “Xian use of language” or an “Xian type of character development.” And her public is getting to know her work, and her public is thinking of X in terms of Y: The literature of Miss X in terms of the Great Tradition; the writings of Miss X alongside the writings of her contemporaries Mr. P and Ms. Q. And Miss X is invited to speak at conferences and expound the essentials of her Xian style, and her public studies her work and spreads the words unto the masses and her public grows, and people she does not know, know her and maybe even some stranger recognizes her on the street from the photo on her book jacket. The literary movement Miss X has helped to create is well under way. And she is on her way home to write, and she gets home and gets writing only to discover that her new writing doesn’t seem to be “Xish” and doesn’t seem to be “Xian.”

Or as someone once told me, “Venus isn’t really a Suzan-Lori Parks play.” To which I responded: “There isn’t any such thing as a Suzan-Lori Parks play.”

What I mean is this. I don’t discount the plays I’ve written but I do realize that I am growing and changing as I grow. Once Miss X starts thinking that she can/should/must only write Xian literature and anything that is not clearly Xian is a betrayal to the great Xian tradition, or a slap in the face to the traditions of all those who have kindly accepted Miss X into their folds—once Miss X buys into the existence of an Xian style of writing and once that purchase keeps her simply and stupidly repeating her last best hit, well, then Miss X gets really stinky—no matter in what genre she writes or in what camp she parks, naturalists, realists, avant-gardists, or experimentalists. As a writer know that your work flows from the river of your spirit, your own private Mississippi. Get out of the way.

But the writer is also probably hearing the voices of critics, actors, editors, producers, dramaturgs, literary agents, parents, teachers, publishers, directors, fans—those people who can help the career along or squash it flat. They want the writer to listen to them, they tell the writer what to write, they tell the writer how to write. We should be careful who we listen to. There are very few people capable of giving a writer honest-to-god good feedback. We must learn to think for ourselves. For feedback on early drafts, I listen to my gut and then to my very close friends—people who care more about me than about any literature I may create, people who will continue to support me whether I take or forsake their advice—real friends. I don’t have readings of my plays before I have a good idea of what the play is. Sometimes artistic directors will plan a reading when they hear the writer has completed a first draft. Appreciate their enthusiasm but the writer needn’t air her work until she is ready. There are writers who enjoy thrashing out their plays in the workshop process. I do most of my writing at home, on my own. This has made me slightly unpopular on the workshop circuit.

The Writer’s Body of Work can in times of great despair give her courage; yes, she can do it because she looks to her BOW and knows that she has done it. But she need not stick to what worked just because it worked once. Often a writer becomes terrified when her new work does not bear an easy resemblance to her work of old. She is afraid she is losing her voice and tosses out the new writing or changes it, forcing it into the old shape, thinking she is keeping her voice intact. The writer’s voice is always inside her. With proper care and hard work, her voice may grow and change, but she needn’t fear—she will never lose it.

Word is that young writers are experimental and then, as the writer grows up, she grows more conventional. Some writers, hungry for wider acceptance, do force their Talent into more conventional shapes, while other writers, not wanting to follow the Individual Talent wherever it leads, dig in their heels and take up permanent residence in their old camps. Both trying to write the next Broadway hit while not listening to the voice that wants to write that small, challenging downtown play, and steadfastly replowing those experimental fields, resisting all the new growth, lopping off the heads of flowers because one only grows corn, are dead ways of living, horrid dead ends of writing.

The Tradition of the Next New Thing. Like the Ghost of Christmas Future, or the Holy Spirit, this is the fun one and the frightening one; this is the shapeless one and the one that lights the way. With the tradition of the Next New Thing we are looking into a future we see in our mind’s eye, in the faces of children, a future that’s held in the past and present too but, for the most part, lives in Tomorrow—an actual, simple dawning of the day, which may or may not happen. It is an interest in this Tomorrow, and a love for it, that moves the writer to send things out, from the pages, futureward. Part of the joy of reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries is that, as she wonders, “Who will read this?” she is imagining her future readers; with her words she conceives each one of us.

The Tradition of the Next New Thing can trip up the writer if she puts the cart before the horse, if she tries to second-guess the future, evaluating her work in the minds of the unborn. The future, and the writer’s place in it, will take care of itself. The upside is that being forgotten isn’t as painful as being ignored and, whether forgotten or ignored, there will very likely be some shining scholar to resurrect all worthy writers. In the future, if there is no shining scholar riding to the rescue, not to worry because we will all be dead and on to other things.

The Future. Worst-case scenario: a world that only allows sports, TV, sex shows, and politics. The Future Folk may not believe in literature and may not see the need to; literature may go the way of God—into amnesia. Best-case scenario (?): Artists rule the world (but will this make for a better art scene and a better world for writers????—think about it). Middle-of-the-road scenario: it is much like it is today, it is much like it has been for hundreds of years—writing is hard work, quality writing rises to the surface along with some crap writing; some crap writing falls along the wayside, along with some quality writing. The future may be a theaterless one, the future may be one with a theater on every corner! What is our greatest fear? That we will be forgotten? That fiction will be outlawed in favor of the tabloid true story? That future generations will be stupid? That no one will read? There are some of us who have become fierce public advocates, fighting to ensure the existence of theater and literature for the future. One could take to the streets, overthrow the government, hold the corporate executives ransom for more money for the arts. But this course of action cannot ensure the future. Look at the Russian Revolution, look at the Berlin Wall. Tastes change, minds change, sensibilities change; this change is frightening and this change is also a part of life.

At this very moment I am writing and riding. Riding the subway home from a library in Harlem where I work with a bunch of schoolkids. Today they gave me an impromptu “present”: an improvised historical theater piece involving Rosa Parks and the back of the bus. Wow.

While we have a responsibility to the Great Tradition and our Personal Tradition, our greatest responsibility may be to the future, the Tradition of the Next New Thing. Our work conceives it. We are who they will know. They will turn to us for solace, humor, guidance, and grace. A great piece of writing is a revolutionary act. Do your best work and the rest will follow.