Donald Murray on the Apprentice Mindset and Return to Discovery

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The Apprentice Mindset — Donald Murray the Return to Discovery

A compulsion to ask why

Where are the dinosaurs? Why do people pray? Where do rainbows go? Children ask curious questions, do they not? They start their lives like sponges, absorbing the world around them. Many of them, however, are soon taught to stop asking why—that it is impolite, troublesome, or blasphemous even. Bit by bit, the blinds to the windows of their minds shut.

Society assumes that it is the child who must learn from the adult, not the other way round. But the notion is wrong. In many respects, the greatest thinkers of our times are more like children than they are like adults. Our finest scientists, artists, and writers are grown-ups that never grow up. They retain their curiosity and the compulsion to ask why. 

The dangers of accomplishment

Indeed, there is a great deal of danger in accomplishment, says the journalist Donald Murray: “Once we learn how to do something, the tendency is to keep doing it. We lose the terror of early days and become content.” Unlike children, we start to avoid risk and failure, preferring instead to settle for good enough.

In his book Writing to Deadline, Murray recalls how valuable his early years as a greenhorn reporter were for his development. His sense of inadequacy and desire to improve drove him to hone his craft. Now in his mid-seventies, and after winning a Pulitzer Prize, Murray wants to retain that feeling of youthful “apprenticeship”. Comfort, he warns, leads to stagnation. 

“I am forever grateful that I will never learn to write but that I will keep on learning.”

Donald Murray. (2000). Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work.

Learning and unlearning

To cultivate our “apprenticeship”, we sometimes have to learn and unlearn what our parents, teachers, and society teaches us. School, for instance, had “taught [Murray] to write long”. Conflating length and verbosity with intelligence, they got him “to use longer and longer words, [and] to make great boa constrictor sentences.” To fulfill his credo as a journalist who writes simply and clearly, Murray had plenty of unlearning to do. [1]

Unlearning extends well beyond literary practice, of course. As Nobel laureate Robert Solow writes on the state of economics: “There has always been a purist streak in economics that wants everything to follow neatly… The theory is neat, learnable, not terribly difficult, but just technical enough to feel like ‘science’.” Indeed, anybody who has endeavored to apply the strong assumptions and axioms of textbook economics to real world problems knows how messy, complex, and uncertain everything truly is.

Young children excel in this department. They face problems with less preconceptions and prejudice than we do. How can they when everything is new to them? It seems that “the more professional we become, the greater the danger that we will see what we expect to see”, Murray warns. Great thinkers retain their “essential naivete”. They balance skepticism with innocence. 

“[We] must be capable of seeing what is new. Clichés of language are significant misdemeanours, but clichés of vision are felonies.”

Donald Murray. (2000). Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work.

Second grader masterpieces

Pixar’s co-founder Ed Catmull agrees. In his book Creativity Inc, he attributes the animation studio’s sustained creativity to their “beginner’s mindset” and their childlike openness to discovery of the unexpected.

This feeling, Catmull explains, was mirrored in an art exhibition that he attended at his daughter’s elementary school. As Catmull inspected their displays, he saw “that the first- and second-grade [artworks] looked better and fresher than those of the fifth-graders”. It seemed to him that the older they got, the “more stiled” and “less inventive” their drawings became.

Much of this is a microcosm of society at large. As a by-product of our evolutionary wiring and social structures, we grow tentative and self-conscious, wary of what others might think of us. And it is this desire for self-preservation that harms our capacity for play and wonder that young children display almost instinctively.

Teacher and learner

From potty training to graduate school, “we are taught by error”, Murray notes. We are conditioned by our families, schools, and society to avoid mistakes. This is a vital driver of learning, of course. But for creative endeavors, strict error-avoidance will deprive us of beautiful accidents.

Murray says his writing began to improve markedly when he began to focus not only on “what was wrong”, but on “what was right” too. The sense of excitement, discovery, and opportunity that comes with success-finding helped to offset the crippling feeling of failure and guilt that tends to accompany fault-finding.

Elite athletes and performers are good at getting this balance right. They study film not only to watch and correct their weaknesses, but to find and replicate their strengths too. Many of them will also cultivate idiosyncratic habits to get their body and mind ready for the next game or act. To them, routines and rituals are about the replication of conditions for success.

The return to discovery

Moreover, to return to a more joyous form of play and discovery, we have to relinquish our want for external validation. Murray admits that he often grappled with the feeling of shame and failure as a budding journalist. The literary establishment, for one, had “taught [him] that poetry was the highest form of literature”, not journalism. And every time an editor or publisher rejected a piece of his, he could not help but feel untalented and unaccomplished. 

But Murray later writes: Whether you’re making sushi or poetry, “art is first craft, and [we can] take pride in the practice of [our] craft”. He also “realized that much of [his] best work was being turned down”, while his “worst was being published and praised”. Most of his pieces, he says, were not dissimilar to the one that won him the Pulitzer Prize. External validation was, at times, rather arbitrary. This insight gave him a newfound satisfaction for his craft and writing from within.

“Writing is not a rational business… The reasons my pieces were rejected… were rarely a matter of talent… I now know that rejection does not mean that I am without talent, that I cannot write, that I have nothing worth saying on the subject. It only means that this particular editor didn’t think this particular draft worked at this particular time for this particular publisher.”

Donald Murray. (2000). Writing to Deadline.

Clearly, we adults have much to learn from carefree children. I am convinced that if we could bring the best qualities of our children into adulthood, we as individuals and a collective would be all the better for it. An apprentice mindset, as Catmull and Murray suggest, will help us not only to learn, but to learn for our own sake. So read a book. Take a class. Try something new. Find your dormant inner-child, and be the humble, eager beginner that we once were.

Footnotes

[1] As an aside, if you want to learn to write more clearly and gracefully, you should study good children’s books. As the journalist David Arnold explains: “Children’s books often have complex themes, yet the writing is clear and condensed, the vocabulary elementary, the alliteration and rhythms of the words and phrasing playful and always audible, and the humor very funny.” Arnold recommends that writers study Florence and Richard Atwater’s Mr Popper’s Penguins, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, William Steig’s Amos and Boris, and Robert McClosky’s One Morning in Maine. Donald Murray himself says that the “papers [he] wrote in the third grade are surprisingly close—strong verbs, specific nouns, short sentences—to how [he] writes today”.

Sources and further reading