Claire Conger

Have you ever had someone say that you were wasting your talent? Or the reverse, that you must not have genius because your work is so, well, popular?

Stephen King addresses this issue in On Writing. For King, it started in school when he was caught with a “newspaper” he’d written satirizing his teachers as only a young boy would. (He started early.) Then he was caught with a story that he was selling to his fellow students. (The kid was enterprising!) Teachers told him he was wasting his talent.

Despite of the successes of Carrie and Misery, I don’t read horror and I’ve never read a Stephen King novel, but I can tell from “On Writing” that King knows his craft. King defends his genre by pointing out how many people he’s entertaining.

Leonard Bernstein had the opposite problem. He was afflicted by critics who branded him a Broadway Show composer–not a serious artist. The audio book Leonard Bernstein, An American Life describes the dichotomy in music between popular and cultured. It was a life-long issue for Bernstein.

This seems really quite silly, especially when you consider the sophistication of the music he wrote for his musicals, but it’s a problem to which I can relate.  As a young person studying piano, I adopted the attitudes of the critics of the day. I allowed them to tell me what was tacky and what was good.

Worst of all, I allowed them to tell me that everything had to be so important!

Luckily for fans of horror stories, King ignored his critics, and luckily for fans of American music, Bernstein went on anyway.