(Hi, folks! For the time being, some, most, or all of the fol­low­ing links will still revert back to the orig­i­nal Writ­ing About Writ­ing web­page over on Blog­ger. This is not a mis­take. It just takes a long time to move thou­sands of arti­cles. Thank you for your patience as we nav­i­gate this tran­si­tion.)

Question: Is Talent Important to a Writer?

Short answer: Not real­ly. At least not the way you’re prob­a­bly using the word. But maybe. But not as much as work.

Longer answer: This is less of a fre­quent­ly asked ques­tion, and more of a fre­quent­ly hot top­ic. 

Some com­ic or writer or some­thing express­es irri­ta­tion at hav­ing their years of study­ing, their decades of prac­tice, their unpaid hours upon hours of build­ing an audi­ence all reduced to “tal­ent*” that some­one envi­ous of them wish­es they simply.…had. (“If only I had TALENT, I could be more like you.…”) Or it goes the oth­er way: tal­ent comes up, and peo­ple are 100% cock­sure it is absolute­ly vital (and usu­al­ly that they got it), and that any­one with­out it is sim­ply wast­ing their time.

[Gen­er­al­ly, no one cares if some­one calls them tal­ent­ed, by the way. Par­tic­u­lar­ly not once or before say­ing their name wrong at the Acad­e­my Awards. It’s a fine word with a lot of metonymy. But when some­one starts to actu­al­ly con­vey that they think that the artist sim­ply has some mys­ti­cal ingre­di­ent that makes them good, and there has­n’t a boat­load of work––that’s when many artists start to get a bit “Well actu­al­ly…” about it.]

And while the exis­tence of tal­ent might be a com­pli­cat­ed top­ic for a series of con­ver­sa­tions, the artist who is hav­ing decades of toil reduced to some innate apti­tude that one is either born with or not isn’t like­ly to find this exchange quite as charm­ing as intend­ed.

But should they point this out, anoth­er group shows up.

There’s a real loud fac­tion out there advo­cat­ing hard for the idea of tal­ent — and let me go ahead and spoil the end­ing for you: they’re almost exclu­sive­ly not the suc­cess­ful writers/artists/whatever. They want tal­ent to be real because they want to believe they have it and that it is going to set them apart. Toss the lot in a cru­cible, and you’ll find the writ­ers on the oth­er side of pay­checks and pub­li­ca­tion gen­er­al­ly have a vast­ly dif­fer­ent pic­ture of what got them there than “tal­ent,” how impor­tant a role “tal­ent” plays, and par­tic­u­lar­ly what could be done by a deter­mined per­son (no mat­ter how old or “untal­ent­ed” when they start) if they want­ed to become good at some kind of art.

Diss­ing “tal­ent” seems to be an exis­ten­tial threat to the for­mer group. I don’t know if it’s because then that means it’s a wake-up call that they’ll have to get off their ass­es or just that almost any­one who works hard can become what they think makes them spe­cial, but they treat the idea poor­ly even though it is ubiq­ui­tous among those they often seek to emu­late.
[Note: I men­tion this peri­od­i­cal­ly in this post, but I want to acknowl­edge it explic­it­ly now: Not every­one can write. There are lim­it­ing fac­tors that it is sheer ableism to ignore. Phys­i­cal real­i­ties of human bod­ies (includ­ing human brains) make it a skill that not every­one has and incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult for oth­ers to cul­ti­vate.]
First of all, it’s real­ly hard to fig­ure out what “tal­ent” even means.

This is like try­ing to mea­sure intelligence–what you end up with is a messy glob of data that has pro­found cul­tur­al bias­es, favors cer­tain kinds of bell­wethers, and reveals a tremen­dous inabil­i­ty to sep­a­rate nature from nur­ture.

It’s a lit­tle eas­i­er in kids, but not that much. But by the time a lin­guis­tic apti­tude shows up, it’s very hard to know if that’s some innate cir­cum­stance of genet­ics or if it has more to do with par­ents who talk a lot and use big words. By the time some­one can be said to have a “tal­ent” in writ­ing, it would be near­ly impos­si­ble to know if that was mere­ly a result of their par­tic­u­lar swirl of genet­ics or if had to do with their par­ents’ love of books, with a ded­i­ca­tion to library vis­its, with trips to muse­ums, with the qual­i­ty of preschool, with their cul­ture’s val­ue on par­tic­u­lar art forms.…whatever. (And if you’re notic­ing that a lot of this “tal­ent” dove­tails strong­ly with hav­ing upper class resources, that’s very per­cep­tive of you.) Even the famed genius­es folks want to hold up as proof of tal­ent, like Mozart, had a child­hood of ded­i­ca­tion, prac­tice, ruth­less dri­ve, and par­ents who could afford to be sup­port­ive. (And by “sup­port­ive” I mean an ambi­tious heli­copter par­ent liv­ing vic­ar­i­ous­ly through their kid.) Look at the actu­al lives (even of wun­derkind), and it com­pli­cates and under­mines the nar­ra­tive of casu­al, unprac­ticed genius.

Not every writer writ­ing for the same amount of time will pro­duce the same qual­i­ty prose even if we could some­how account for styl­is­tic dif­fer­ences (we can’t), but con­sid­er this: Fifty years ago the dom­i­nant thought in cre­ative writ­ing pro­grams was that genius could NOT be taught. You either had it or you did­n’t. Then a bunch of edu­ca­tion experts broke down what peo­ple meant by “genius” and dis­cov­ered that actu­al­ly most of it could be learned in a class­room. What will we under­stand fifty years from now, I won­der.

What IS clear is that very lit­tle under the super­fi­cies of what peo­ple call “tal­ent” can’t be trained, prac­ticed, refined, achieved through care­ful revi­sion, or taught, even much lat­er in life, what­ev­er their “open­ing” skill set, and that seems to break with the idea that you’re either good at some­thing or you’re not.

Try­ing to fig­ure out whether you have tal­ent or not is almost mean­ing­less. Defin­ing it and under­stand­ing it is near­ly impos­si­ble and it won’t take the place of work any­way.

Okay, well, what­ev­er you call it, some peo­ple have a leg up, right?

Sort of?

Some peo­ple start with a leg up, though it prob­a­bly depends on what you con­sid­er the “start­ing line.”(First grade? Grad­u­a­tion from high school? 20 years old? Grad­u­a­tion from col­lege? 30?)  Cer­tain­ly, some peo­ple, through some unknown cock­tail of nature and nur­ture may have an advan­tage over oth­ers, but this will not last if they do not con­tin­ue to work, par­tic­u­lar­ly if they count on that advan­tage to keep them bet­ter than those who work hard. A hard-work­ing writer with less ini­tial advan­tage can catch up, and even­tu­al­ly excel beyond them.

In fact, this hap­pens quite often.

What seems to be clear is that, bar­ring phys­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions, get­ting real­ly good at a skill like writ­ing might take a while and a lot of effort, but it does­n’t require one to be innate­ly “good” and can be start­ed at any point. And while an ath­let­ic skill start­ed after forty might mean some­one is nev­er going to the Olympics, they can still get quite good; and fur­ther­more, writ­ing tends to have a longer win­dow of oppor­tu­ni­ty before it is made dif­fi­cult by bio­log­i­cal degen­er­a­tion in most humans. Some folks write best­sellers and lit­er­ary mas­ter­pieces into their fifties, six­ties, and even nineties.

An aspir­ing writer nev­er deemed to have “tal­ent” and lack­ing a casu­al skill in writ­ing could begin in their thir­ties to read vora­cious­ly, prac­tice writ­ing, com­mit them­selves to improv­ing, learn the craft, study nar­ra­tive and sto­ry­telling, teach them­selves the gram­mar they still strug­gle with, and, in short, immerse them­selves in read­ing and writ­ing, and with­in a only few months would be writ­ing at a lev­el far beyond some­one who was told they were “tal­ent­ed” in high school and got all A’s in their Eng­lish degree, who then went on to be a gen­er­al man­ag­er at the Coco’s in Arca­dia, rarely reads any­more these days, and almost nev­er writes except to poke at a half-fin­ished vam­pire vs. zom­bies nov­el tucked in a draw­er every once in a while when the inspi­ra­tion hits on their days off. 

Even if the lat­ter still nur­tures the qui­et belief that they have tal­ent. 

With­in a few years, the for­mer might have an audi­ence and per­haps be mak­ing some mon­ey while the lat­ter is basi­cal­ly doing the same thing as ten years ear­li­er except hop­ing that this time around they’ll get that pro­mo­tion to dis­trict man­ag­er. Where’s the tal­ent now?

Even the most inef­fa­ble qual­i­ties of many writ­ers — like imag­i­na­tion and lan­guage play that can’t nec­es­sar­i­ly be taught — CAN be prac­ticed like a mus­cle and most folks will get bet­ter at it in time. There are some neu­ro­di­ver­gences that would make this par­tic­u­lar­ly hard, and such folks might have to stick to more clin­i­cal writ­ing. Still, what cer­tain­ly mer­its out over and over again is that if there IS some­thing like tal­ent, it means absolute­ly bup­kis next to hard work.

Is there some­thing? Any­thing?

Sort of?

There are some obsta­cles (like learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties). It would be ableist to claim that every­one will have exact­ly the same difficulty/ease becom­ing a suc­cess­ful writer. Of course some peo­ple have a phys­i­cal­ly hard­er time writ­ing. And cer­tain dis­or­ders make orga­nized thought take more effort. It stands to rea­son that oth­er folks will have an eas­i­er time. (But if you want an exam­ple of some­one with two major learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties [dyslex­ia and fuck­ing RAGING ADHD] who has sub­sti­tut­ed hard work and pas­sion for innate abil­i­ty, and got­ten to the point where they’re mak­ing mon­ey writ­ing, you’re read­ing them.) 

Obvi­ous­ly, there are some peo­ple who have pro­cliv­i­ties to tell sto­ries or dis­play lin­guis­tic apti­tude. There are peo­ple who have the dis­ci­pline to sit and write alone, calm­ly and for hours; the kind of self-con­trol that oth­er peo­ple can’t even fath­om. There are peo­ple who are exquis­ite­ly pre­cise with lan­guage. And there are peo­ple with a pen­chant for keep­ing large ensem­ble casts of char­ac­ters in their heads. (This may have more to do with whether they end up being a tech writer, a poet, or a nov­el­ist than whether they can write at all, but cer­tain­ly these incli­na­tions exist.) Maybe we don’t know if these pre­dis­po­si­tions are all in the genes or have some­thing to do with ear­ly child­hood (maybe we’re all wrong, and it’s pre­na­tal vit­a­mins or zodi­ac signs [Libras, baby! We’re all entire­ly a mono­lith of writ­ers.]), but they’re there ear­ly enough to affect a whole life­time.

How­ev­er, the most mean­ing­ful “tal­ent” when it comes to who mer­its out at being a “suc­cess­ful” writer (by what­ev­er bell­wether is being used to define suc­cess) seems to be gen­uine­lyen­joy­ing writ­ing (and read­ing), and being pas­sion­ate about doing it and get­ting bet­ter at it. It’s the peo­ple who like sit­ting down every day to do some writ­ing and who enjoy the endeav­or even when it feels like work who typ­i­cal­ly have envi­able careers or acco­lades, not the peo­ple who run around try­ing to find a Tal­ent-O-Meter to use on them­selves. If some­one likes writ­ing and has been doing it reg­u­lar­ly for years, they’re like­ly to be seen as “tal­ent­ed” by most of the world that uses that word as a syn­onym for “skill that took a lot of hard work to acquire.”

Math­e­mat­i­cal apti­tude exists too, but you rarely hear physi­cists wor­ry­ing about their tal­ent.

But what about prodi­gies and the com­plete­ly tal­ent­less? Sure­ly they are real?

Sure.

And if you were one, I guar­an­tee you’d already know it.

The Shake­spear­es and Faulkn­ers and Mor­risons and Rumis of the world may be beyond the grasp of most to approach, and we may nev­er com­pose such delec­table prose, but keep in mind a few things:

1) These peo­ple may have had some­thing “tal­ent-shaped,” but they stayed at the top of their game with hard work. If Shake­speare had gone into the goat breed­ing busi­ness and only ever wrote “when the muse moved him to words,” we’d prob­a­bly be down one Globe the­ater, all read­ing Beck­ett and Wilde in high school, and peo­ple would have to say my sweet and charm­ing inno­cence is as pure as some­thing OTHER than the dri­ven snow (which, bar­ing the occa­sion­al three­some, it total­ly is).

2) An okay writer can become a good writer with work. A decent writer can write some­thing poignant. A good writer can have a career, and even write a mas­ter­piece with enough revi­sion. Almost none of us are Shake­speare or Mor­ri­son, but most of us can devel­op our skill.

3) The tru­ly “tal­ent­less” writer is prob­a­bly as rare as the Shake­speare or Mor­ri­son. It’s the entire oth­er side of the bell curve and just as rare. Most peo­ple who love read­ing and love writ­ing (and are not just florid­ly express­ing love for some­thing they nev­er do) are pret­ty good at it. Not that every­one is pret­ty good at writ­ing, but most of those who are not don’t actu­al­ly want to be writ­ers, and many of them don’t read very much. It’s like hav­ing some­one with actu­al amu­sia (not just an unprac­ticed ear) who wants to be a (non-per­cus­sion) musi­cian. It hap­pens, but it’s very, very rare that some­one with amu­sia actu­al­ly pas­sion­ate­ly burns to recre­ate the note‑y part of music (the beat and the lyrics would be more like­ly). Most of us who love writ­ing have gone through a haz­ing process that we weren’t even aware of over the years, and we are going to get bet­ter if we get our ass­es to work.

Now if you’re using prodi­gies to prove that there must be a bell curve that some peo­ple fall fur­ther to the right on, that’s prob­a­bly true in the­o­ry, but even if you could sep­a­rate it from pas­sion and hard work (spoil­er: you can’t), on a long enough time­line, it won’t mat­ter. Genius might give you a boost, but the work will always mer­it out.
Why do we have such a hard time let­ting go of this idea?

I think there are a lot of rea­sons. Cul­tur­al mythos nar­ra­tives of excep­tion­al­ism. The ubiq­ui­ty of prodigies–often mes­sian­ic “cho­sen one” prodigies–in pop­u­lar media. A deep soci­etal demand that we be “real­ly good” at some­thing “pro­duc­tive” because that’s what good cap­i­tal­ists do. A strong cor­re­la­tion that belief in tal­ent has with unearned advan­tages (such as being born rich or being a white man) that prob­a­bly leads to feel­ings of enti­tle­ment. And the fear of some­thing called “effort shock,” which frankly (when it comes to writ­ing) should ter­ri­fy the total fuck­ing shiznit out of any­one who does­n’t love writ­ing for its own sake.

Did you know that it goes back to a class issue? It’s why painters often DO want to be called “tal­ent­ed” instead of skilled. Paint­ing used to be skilled labor. Then it was turned into a “fine art” that only the aris­toc­ra­cy sat around doing and sud­den­ly sprez­zatu­ra demand­ed that they need­ed anoth­er word that meant any­thing oth­er than “long hard hours of prac­tice.”

It’s a seduc­tive world to imag­ine that if we aren’t good at some­thing, it’s because we lack some je ne sais quoi we can’t con­trol, not because we haven’t put in suf­fi­cient effort. Sim­i­lar­ly, it’s more com­pelling to imag­ine there’s an “IT” (and we have IT and could tap IT at any time, should we so choose) than to imag­ine that lots of folks could quick­ly and eas­i­ly match and then exceed our skill if they start­ed work­ing hard.

What does mat­ter?

Iron­i­cal­ly, most suc­cess­ful writ­ers (the ones you’ve heard of–the ones you might have a book of on your shelf or rec­og­nize the names of) have a very dif­fer­ent for­mu­la for what got them to where they are. They don’t spend a lot of time wor­ried about tal­ent. Not that there aren’t any arro­gant writ­ers who talk about how awe­some they have been since the moment of their con­cep­tion (there total­ly are), but for the most part, most writ­ers pret­ty con­sis­tent­ly talk about a dif­fer­ent hand­ful of con­trib­u­tors to their suc­cess. Some leave out one or two (though nev­er the first one on this list) but these are the recur­rent themes.

Tons of hard work: I don’t real­ly know any writ­ers (per­son­al­ly or through sto­ries shared by those I’ve nev­er met) who got to where they would con­sid­er them­selves suc­cess­ful, and who don’t ALSO have sim­i­lar sto­ries of the long, gru­el­ing hours they toiled away at per­fect­ing their craft. A few of them under­took some part of this process in the ser­vice of anoth­er writ­ing career (tech writ­ing or con­tent writ­ing), some learned in years of col­lege and MFA pro­grams, but all of them have put in the hours. Some have put in decades of “unpaid intern­ship” hours before they see their first pay­check or fan. Some had to walk five miles as chil­dren to get to the library that was their sanc­tu­ary against the bul­lies (uphill both ways, right, Dad?). Some worked full time jobs, came home and cooked din­ner, put the tod­dlers to bed and crept into the hall­way (since there was no ded­i­cat­ed office and that is where the TV was least dis­tract­ing) to write for a half an hour a night. 

But all have worked hard and none relied on tal­ent to car­ry them.

They do the work. And they rec­og­nize that the more work they do, the bet­ter their out­put becomes.

Unearned (but not innate) advan­tages: Odd­ly we come full cir­cle to the idea that much of what we call “tal­ent” might actu­al­ly be priv­i­lege. A lot of writ­ers acknowl­edge that their hum­ble begin­nings of wri­ter­dom sparked by hav­ing access to a library, par­ents that read to them every night, or a writer in the fam­i­ly. Maybe they had a tiny bit of nepo­tism in the form of an uncle who is an agent or edi­tor, or a trust fund to burn through in those ini­tial years of writ­ing with­out pay. (Some obvi­ous­ly have more advan­tage than oth­ers.) They acknowl­edge the role some­thing that was nei­ther earned nor innate had in shap­ing their des­tiny as a writer. They may not call it “priv­i­lege,” but they acknowl­edge it.

And some will call it privilege–recognizing that pub­lish­ing is white­washed, sex­ism and het­ero­nor­ma­tiv­i­ty influ­ence what sells, class restricts access, and even their titan­ic amount of work might not yet have found fecund soil were their cir­cum­stances dif­fer­ent.

Luck: Most writ­ers seem to have a sense of for­tune. Maybe it comes from telling our­selves so many “believ­able” sto­ries that gen­uine coin­ci­dences are things we would tell our­selves are implau­si­ble and deus ex machi­na. (“Ridicu­lous that this book offer would just HAPPEN. Please revise!”) Not that these writ­ers think any­one, regard­less of skill, stand­ing at the same place at the same time, would have got­ten the same oppor­tu­ni­ty, but it seems a lot of us aren’t quite sure we quite earned every twist of for­tune that came our way. (I often talk about how lucky I got to have my Face­book page explode–I would not be where I am today with­out it.)

Maybe just a lit­tle bit of nerve: The writ­ers who are mak­ing mon­ey (or maybe not, but enjoy­ing suc­cess by their own yard­sticks) all seem to share just the tini­est bit of mox­ie. Most strug­gle with imposter syn­drome. Many fret about their peer reviews and are dev­as­tat­ed by crit­i­cism. (~rais­es hand~) But at the end of the day, they do believe they have some­thing worth say­ing and they keep putting them­selves out there for the world to see (.….and point at.….and tear apart).

Almost none, ever, talk about their tal­ent.

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