Is genius practice, divine spark or somewhere in-between?

My dear wife told me at lunch I needed to read the past two blog entries over at Good Letters, the Image Journal blog. (I subscribed to this blog for a while and enjoyed it, but in the interest of time have unsubscribed since it deals mainly with writing and not so much the plastic arts.) Yesterday’s post is an interesting piece on the never-ending debate on what constitutes course language. That is, should Christians cuss? The second is a reflective entry written by a writer on the process of writing, To Write by Ann Conway.

The following is an excerpt from Conway’s entry:

The former is exemplified by what I think of as the “creativity business,” the idea that the untrammeled flow of primal “free” writing—uninhibited by an inner critic—is in fact the best writing. And evidence of the divine within us. This is promulgated by The Artist’s Way and its permutations; it is the kind of writing one practices in the Tuscan retreats advertised in the back pages of Poets and Writers. It says that everyone is a writer, a statement with which I do not entirely agree. But I do agree that there is a sobering amount of talent out there.

A recent New York Times column by David Brooks outlines a radically different slant on the creative process. Offering a contrast to those who see genius as “the product of divine spark,” bestowed on those “who are best approached with reverential awe”—such as Dante or Mozart—Brooks points out that the key element of genius is the repetition of the basic elements of craft. Recent neurological research stresses that simple, unglamorous practice is how one gets better.

The “divine spark,” the columnist concludes, is merely romantic “hocus-pocus.”

Unlike Brooks, however, I do not discount the divine spark. I recently finished the new Flannery O’Connor biography by Brad Gooch. I found the book uninspiring, but I smiled to see how “touched” O’Connor seemed from the beginning—closeting herself, even as a tiny child, with her drawing and writing, imagining a guardian angel who was half-bird, half-man. She was, in a word, weird. And driven.

The word “genius” has so much baggage in our culture, especially in terms of the arts. I’m wondering if we’re not just batting around semantics in this discussion, and that from a Christian point of view “genius” could be equated to a gifting. I don’t think anyone will disagree that some people are born with talents that others do not possess. However, when we talk about a genius in our culture we imply — based on my own understanding of the word — something beyond a God-given talent.

Read the article in its entirety here.