For all the reputed values, enthusiasm, and idealism reported as embodied in today’s college students and younger professionals, there’s one value far too many are lacking and whose value these young adults totally fail to grasp.
That’s the necessity of practicing certain skills until they are letter-perfect, even when such practice is boring and seems to be drudgery. A few weeks ago, I attended a professional opera convention [as a guest. You’d never want to hear me sing.]. One of the comments that came up time and time again from professional directors in the field was the necessity for young singers to not only have a fine and trained voice, but to have mastered basic musicianship – to have the ability to play the piano well enough to accompany themselves in practice, to be able to work out the most complex rhythms, to have mastered perfect intonation and diction [and that means working to eliminate regionalisms and mispronunciations in everyday speech]. These are not the exciting aspects of opera, singing the grand arias, perfecting stage presence, and the like. They’re fundamentals, and mastering them takes long and hard work. Year after year, my wife sees students with great natural voices who she knows will go absolutely nowhere, simply because they’ve gotten where they are on pure natural talent, but they’ll never get any better, because, to get to the truly professional level, their fundamental musicianship has to be outstanding, and that takes work they aren’t willing to undertake, and in some cases, those skills are so lacking that it’s literally too late for such students to develop them, even if they were willing to work that hard on those basics.
This principle applies in all fields. One of my daughters is a doctor, surgeon, and senior professor at an excellent medical school. Several years ago, more than a few would-be doctors were absolutely appalled at their additional weekend assignment – if necessary, hours of repetition in practicing stitches until these doctors-to-be could meet her standards, simply because their stitches were sloppy, uneven, and didn’t meet professional standards. Boring? Yes. Drudgery? Absolutely! But if you’re the one they might be operating on, wouldn’t you want those stitches to be as perfect as possible? And despite surgical staples and modern adhesives, there are times and places where old-fashioned stitches are indeed necessary.
I’ve seen the same thing in writing, especially in science fiction and fantasy. Too many young would-be writers immediately embark upon writing the great fantasy novel. Some do not even understand, on a technical level, what a sentence is. Nor do most understand that, to write a truly original work of SF or fantasy, a writer must actually know far more than a “mainstream” writer does. When writing mainstream fiction, a writer doesn’t have to think in any great depth about the economic or political structure of our society, but only about how it works or doesn’t. I still remember a comment Ben Bova made on one of my early stories. He pointed out that a gadget I mentioned in the second paragraph invalidated the entire culture and setting. When you write F&SF, if you want it to be good, the magic/technology has to fit with the culture, the people, the economics, the geography, the political structure… and a lot more… and learning all that isn’t easy. Neither is applying it. Both take work, intellectual drudgery, if you will.
The problem is that, today, everything’s supposed to be interesting, even fun. I’m sorry, but being successful in anything is going to take a whole lot of drudgery, and those who skip it may succeed for a while… before the roof – and the world – fall on them and crush them.