Jane Austen and the Craftsman's Mindset
Skills trump passion, yes, but passion still has its role.
She was about twelve when she got down to serious work on her craft.
The evidence is in the three vellum notebooks that are still preserved, one in Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the other two in the British Library in London.
In the first notebook, as Paula Byrne explains, Jane Austen wrote her first little stories, plays, poems, and satires.[1] The second notebook contains two epistolary novelettes, a parodic “History of England,” while the third notebook contains a fragmentary story called “Evelyn” and the much longer, though still unfinished, “Catharine, or the Bower.”
The cover of each notebook is given a title such as that found on your typical 18th- and 19th-century three-part novel: Volume the First, Volume the Second, and Volume the Third. She learned her craft by doing what any craftsman does: imitating the masters. Byrne estimates that the writings in these three vellum notebooks amount to some 90,000 words. From the first Jane Austen had a craftsman’s mindset.
The Craftsman’s Mindset: Six Characteristics
The craftsman’s mindset is essential not only to the making of the greatest art, like Jane Austen’s novels, but also to doing any kind of great work. Further, as both Matthew Crawford and Cal Newport have argued, the craftsman’s mindset is essential to cultivating habits of attention able to resist the incessant encroachments of digital technology.[2]
What are the characteristics of the craftsman’s mindset? The craftsman looks at his or her work in the following way:
1. There is, first, a community of masters and apprentices, otherwise known as a practice, where apprentices undergo a regimen of training designed to help them achieve mastery in the acting craft and, through the craft, be of service to the world.
2. There is thus in a practice an authoritative structure to which the apprentice must submit in order to develop mastery in the practice. As this authoritative structure persists over time it becomes a tradition (from the Latin tradere = to hand over).
3. There is a body of knowledge, a know-how, that the masters pass on to the apprentices. In Taika Waititi’s hilarious comedy, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, knowledge of how to survive in the New Zealand bush is called, simply, “the knack.” To gain a certain knack is the point of a practice.
4. The knack is tacit knowledge, as opposed to explicitly theoretical or speculative knowledge. It is a feel for how things should go more than a set of rules or prescriptions. Theoretical knowledge might come along with the knack, but it is not required unless the practice, like that of philosophy or of quantum physics, is about theorizing.
5. Liberty of expression and creative extensions of the knack are only possible after the apprentice undergoes the discipline of submitting him- or herself to the authoritative structure of the practice.
6. Participation in a practice is a kind of inquiry into truth, beauty, and goodness.
Getting Down to Work: Deliberate Practice
To approach one’s work with a craftsman’s mindset is the antithesis of plowing forward aimlessly into a task.
It means that you do not vaguely aim at “getting it done” or even “doing it better this time.”
Rather, with the craftsman’s mindset you aim at sustained, repeated practice of a particular technique in a way that pushes you out of your comfort zone and allows you to grow—ideally under the supervision of a coach or mentor and with immediate feedback on the results, so that the next iteration of the technique can be refined.[3]
Further, with the craftsman’s mindset, you set up a specific strategy for facing the challenge in the work session ahead. One such strategy is an imitation exercise, where you pick an example of superior work in the field you are working in and imitate it.
The aim of any work session is to achieve “flow,” which happens when
1. Order has been put into the work session with a good strategy
2. You work with great intensity on the technique being focused on
3. You work with great constancy—not allowing yourself to be distracted from the task for any trivial reason (such as scrolling on your phone).
A reliable sign of “flow” is that you are working intensely, and you have a sense that time is passing quickly. Also, and paradoxically, a sign of “flow” is that, when you are interrupted, you are not upset, because it shows you are in control of the work, and not just getting dragged along. An interruption (i.e. by another person) is just another opportunity to serve. It shouldn’t throw you off.
She didn’t know it as such, but Jane Austen was practicing the craft of fiction deliberately in all those intense childhood hours she spent imitating and parodying models of works that amused her.
In sum, the craftsman’s mindset armed with habits of deliberate practice reframes the challenge of work. It sees work not in the doing mode, much less the threat mode, but as an opportunity to grow, to achieve greater mastery in the craft, to transform one’s life, to love and serve others. (For more on the doing mode and the threat mode, see the post linked here…)
The craftsman’s mindset thus draws upon the virtue of magnanimity, “greatness of soul,” which endeavors to use and expand one’s powers in order to achieve great things that bring the greatest service to others.
The Role of Passion
Cal Newport has contrasted the craftsman’s mindset with the passion mindset.
The craftsman mindset focuses on the rare and valuable skills that you can offer the world, while the passion mindset focuses on the satisfaction that a job or task gives you.
Going at one’s professional life with the passion mindset alone is, Newport argues, a recipe for disaster, and in this he is absolutely right. Without the rare and valuable skills made possible through submission to a craft, no amount of passion is going to be of service.
A common objection to Newport’s position is what he calls “the argument from pre-existing passion”: “At its core is the idea that the craftsman mindset is only viable for those who already feel passionate about their work, and therefore it cannot be put forward as an alternative to the passion mindset.”
Against the argument from pre-existing passion, Newport offers two counterarguments: (1) the source of a craftsman’s mindset is not some unquestionable inner passion, but the far more pragmatic understanding of what actually works in the given practice; and (2) passion flows from, rather than pre-exists, the adoption of the craftsman’s mindset.
Yet why did the young Jane Austen begin filling up those vellum notebooks with stories and poems and parodies? Why didn’t she utilize her time studying Latin or astronomy?
The answer to this question must be that she enjoyed stories and poems and satire more than she enjoyed Latin and astronomy. Consider how Paula Byrne describes Austen’s juvenilia:
“These are the earliest works of Jane Austen, copied in her best hand and preserved by her. Why did she write them out this way? First and foremost, for the amusement of her family, Pasted to the inside front board of Volume the First, the most worn of the three, is a note penned by [Austen’s sister Cassandra] after her sister’s death: ‘For my brother Charles. I think I recollect that a few of the trifles in this Vol. were written expressively for his amusement.’ But Jane Austen also to the trouble of creating these books, which involved much labor with goose quill and inkwell, so as to present herself, at least in her own imagination, as a professional author. Though written by hand, the volumes have the accoutrements of proper published books: contests lists, dedications, chapter divisions. Even as a teenager, Jane Austen knew what she wanted from life: to be a writer.”[4]
This description indicates a nuanced relationship between passion and the craftsman’s mindset in the young Jane Austen. Clearly, she very much enjoyed the books she was reading or had read aloud to her. These works—representing, for well or ill, the traditions of fiction and poetry, and even of historical writing, of her day—fired her imagination and gave her a passion to imitate them. Pace Newport, there had to have been in Austen a pre-existing passion, or else she would never have asked her father (as she no doubt did) for the gift of the three vellum notebooks.
Granted, her teenage passion to be a writer may not have been as clear as Byrne describes it. It may have taken some time to crystallize. But there was at least a sense of amusement that inspired her to sit down with the goose quill and inkwell and begin to imitate. Her craftsman’s mindset developed as she imitated—at first, just for fun, and later, for more serious reasons.
But again, Newport is surely right that, when it comes to obtaining rare and valuable skills, skill trumps passion. For passion alone did not produce Austen’s marvelous juvenilia, much less her mature fiction. Without a craftsman’s mindset, Jane Austen would never have produced the writing in those three vellum notebooks, an extraordinary accomplishment that no doubt spurred in her an even greater and more focused passion for writing.
[1] I quote freely here from Chapter 3 of Byrne’s charming biography of Austen, The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things (New York: HarperCollins, 2013). The chapter is entitled “The Vellum Notebooks.”
[2] See Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in An Age of Distraction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), especially Chapter 6; and Cal Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for the Work You Love (London: Piatkus, 2016), especially Chapter 4. I draw freely from these writers throughout this post, though I also have in mind the philosophical work on skilled practices done by Alasdair MacIntyre.
[3] I draw here not only upon Cal Newport, who in turn draws upon Anders K. Ericsson’s seminal work on deliberate practice, but also upon various discussions of deliberate practice by Dr. Kevin Majeres on his Optimal Work podcast.
[4] Byrne, The Real Jane Austen, 54.
*** The photograph at the top of this post is of Jane Austen’s writing desk at her home in the village of Chawton, near Alton in Hampshire, where she lived from 1809 until her death in 1817. It was taken by me last summer when my wife and I enjoyed a wonderful day at the Jane Austen’s House Museum.
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