The Myth of the Gifted Writer, and What Sylvester Stallone Shows Us About Being a Storyteller

Today’s guest post is by novelist and freelance writer Rebecca Morrison.

The last person I expected to teach me something about the craft of writing was Sylvester Stallone. Like most people, I knew him from his iconic movie roles, Rocky and Rambo. What I didn’t know was before he became a star, he was a young man obsessed with learning the craft of writing and storytelling.

In his memoir, The Steps, Stallone outlines a master class in something we don’t talk enough about: writing as a learned skill, instead of some ethereal magic that comes to you.

We’re surrounded by romanticized portrayals of brilliant writers in movies and television. A writer sits at a desk and begins typing furiously, and from deep inside them a mysterious talent comes out that helps them make something breathtakingly beautiful.

I used to believe this. When I first began writing, I assumed that successful authors had something I didn’t. They had a natural ability to put words together and create compelling characters and scenes. I thought that if you had this talent, you sat down and wrote, and somehow the brilliance magically emerged.

What I’ve learned as I’ve written and published my first novel and dozens of essays in national outlets, and what Stallone shares in detail in his memoir, is that writing is less mysterious and much more demanding than I’d imagined. It takes practice, discipline, persistence, and an enormous willingness to keep getting better.

In his memoir, Stallone shares that as a young man, he was obsessed with storytelling. He worked as an usher in a movie theater where he watched the same films over and over. He spent hundreds of hours transcribing dialogue, examining scenes, and analyzing the structure of the movies. He looked at why a scene held an audience’s attention and why another one didn’t. He wondered what made certain dialogue believable. And how you create tension, build a character, move an audience. He broke down the elements of storytelling to see not just what made a good movie, but why it worked.

What struck me beyond his dogged determination, was his belief that writing and storytelling was something he could learn. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea of spending 10,000 hours mastering a skill. Stallone’s experience shows that becoming a great storyteller requires so much more than having a good idea. It takes enormous work to turn that idea into something captivating.

When I left my career as an attorney to become a writer, I had no idea how much work it would take to learn this new profession. I thought I had good stories and that would somehow make me a good writer. I was laughably wrong. My writing was mediocre at best.

So, I put my crushed ego aside and took dozens of writing classes, jumped on any webinar I could find, went to a series of book panels, and talked to any writer that was open to giving me advice. I studied different types of essays and novels, read piles of craft books, and wrote a lot of pieces that were awful.

I kept writing, and believing I could get better. I read my words out loud over and over trying to make each sentence clear, smooth, interesting. And got a bit better at telling stories in a way that readers cared about.

But even after publishing essays in national outlets and writing a novel, I sometimes wonder whether I’m good enough, whether the stories I want to tell matter, or whether I should stop putting so much energy into work that might never find a home.

As writers, we’re often encouraged to believe in ourselves, to keep submitting despite rejection. And even though that advice has value, it leaves out something important I remind myself of constantly: that we need to also keep improving our work.

We have to examine our writing and ask why it isn’t working instead of hoping a reader will appreciate it. And to revise it with the same energy and determination we have when we put down our first drafts. No matter how many essays we publish or books we write, we can become better at creating characters, building tension, structuring a story, or finding the right words to express an emotion.

I no longer see successful writers as people who are born with a genius I don’t have. I see them as people who, whatever natural abilities they started with, have spent years developing their skills.

There’s something profoundly liberating about that. Because if writing isn’t a magical gift given to a fortunate few, then we have control over how good we can become. That’s the part of writing we should romanticize, the person who returns to their desk day after day, writing, revising, struggling, and getting better one word at a time.

Rebecca Morrison

Rebecca Morrison is the author of The Blue Dress, a novel based on her childhood as an Iranian immigrant. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and NBC News, among others. You can find her at rebeccakmorrison.com.