Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of Charles Mingus. I started with the album Ah Um, recognised as a classic and without a doubt featuring a composer with a strong and distinct voice setting him apart from some of the other big names in jazz. And then I took a step backwards and picked up a set of 10 CDs for £8, one of those dubious bootleg collections that I typically avoid. Only, on this occasion, I was curious, and my curiosity has been rewarded.

The CDs chart Mingus’s time as a bassist sideman with a variety of other peoples’ bands in the forties and fifties, and seem (information is sketchy) to be taken from contemporary radio broadcasts. It’s a fascinating glimpse into an era of jazz that I’d not explored much before now, featuring bands playing tunes many of which are now regarded as standards, but at the time were just the pop hits of the day. And there are glimpses of what’s to come for Mingus, in some of the more eccentric arrangements, playful chorus vocals by band members, idiosyncratic takes on the blues.

You can chart much the same progress with some writers. The recently dead Anthony Minghella started out writing for tv on Jim Henson’s The Storyteller, and I’m betting the stories he developed there weren’t as moving and memorable as what he went on to achieve in Truly Madly Deeply or The English Patient. And why would they be? There’s a world of difference between being a journeyman writer on someone else’s tv show and creating your own feature film from scratch. Not, I’m sure, that he’d have put less than 100% into writing for Henson, or Inspector Morse, or whatever else – but there’s a substantial difference between applying yourself to someone else’s intellectual property and coming up with your own. I know this myself from the difference between writing for Doctors and coming up with my own series and pilot episode for it: much as I learned from the first, the second has been even more valuable for me though no one has yet given me any money for it.

It’s traditional to assume that some people are fully fledged genii from birth, but I’m dubious about that. Orson Welles is often raised at this point as an example of someone who wowed people with his first film, Citizen Kane. But a bit of investigation and you’ll discover that Welles wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near a film set if he hadn’t already impressed with a strong track record in theatre and radio drama. Welles had been writing, performing and directing for a decade or more at the point that he made Kane at the age of 25.

So, judging by the examples of Mingus, Minghella, and Welles, the issue about when genius strikes is primarily to do with how you learn from your experiences, and what beliefs form about your capabilities and limitations. And some people have healthier beliefs about themselves than others. Why would Steven Spielberg be troubled by self-doubt about his ability to make films when he’s been making them since he was less than ten? They’re just something he does: all that’s changed is the scale.

Conversely, other people have experiences that they choose to let limit them in the future: having had a bad experience working on his biggest film, Once Upon A Time In The Midlands, Shane Meadows has retreated to making films on a smaller scale. Which isn’t to disparage the films he’s made since, Dead Man’s Shoes and This Is England: both have been very successful for him. Not that I’m in any position to tell Mr Meadows what to do, mind, but having heard him talk at screenings about the trauma he experienced working on his biggest film (in financial/logistical terms), it’d be good for Shane to get some therapy and rethink the notion of working on a large scale…I’d love to see his Seven Samurai, or Godfather based on a Uttoxeter crime dynasty.