What is talent?
So, this is a question that comes up from time to time, along with things like, “What is quality?” or “What is excellence?” And in the same breath, “Is there such a thing as quality or is it all opinion?” And in this previous post about excellence, I said, There is clearly such a thing as excellence, and added a fundamental conclusion, which can be recognized by experts in the field, who find the excellent thing absorbing in a way that non-excellent things just aren’t.
So that leads to this different but related question: Is there such a thing as talent? And if so, what is it? The link in this paragraph says:
[B]readth and depth of expertise is typically acquired through 10 years of deliberate practice, where a motivated individual constantly strives to learn from feedback, and engages in targeted exercises
And this strongly suggests that talent = dedicated practice, which is not a bad answer, in my opinion. The linked article is all “directed by a mentor” and I’m not so sure that’s a thing in learning to write, because few skilled novelists have a parent who was a novelist. I mean, I’m sure it’s not zero, but it’s not a lot. Almost no novelist is going to have a mentor to guide them in practice for ten years. This is going to have to be self-directed practice for almost all novelists, I think. I don’t think I’m wrong or misled by my own experience, which basically included zero mentors.
The linked article continues: While deliberate practice is a large part of the story of success, it is unlikely to be the entire story. After all, what contributes to the motivation to practice in the first place?
And that latter question is the part I think matters. In the context of writing, related questions get asked, such as, “Is talent a thing when it comes to writing fiction, or is it all learned skill? Can you teach someone to be a good writer of fiction if they aren’t already gifted?” Gifted, here, in this sense, is the same thing as talented.
You get people such as James Scott Bell saying, “Sure, I can teach you how to write fiction,” and you get things like the exceedingly well know Clarion workshop, which apparently yields a positive return for a good many attendees, such as here and here, though presumably not all of them. I agree, in a way: I think once someone has reached a certain level of sentence-level skill, then it’s probably mostly possible to teach that person something like basic story structure and they can probably learn to write at least passible stories, and I’m thinking of a handful of bestselling novels with fairly terrible first pages, such as this one, and some of these, and concluding that it probably doesn’t take that much for someone to learn to write to that standard, maybe even a better standard than that.
Which does not say anything about talent, unless it says talent is unimportant. Which I don’t actually believe. I think talent is very important, which kicks the question back to “What is talent?” and “Is talent the same thing as practice?”
And what I am thinking of here is Mira Grant saying that, when she was in high school, she wrote a sonnet every day. I am almost totally sure I saw her say that somewhere. (Twitter?) I’m going to assume for the moment that I did see her mention something like this someplace, even though I don’t recall where I saw it and can’t provide a link. For my purposes, what matters is that this is totally believable.
How many professional novelists did something like that, I wonder? Because I bet it was a lot. Not exactly this sonnet-a-day thing, of course, but something LIKE that. This is where the ten years of dedicated practice happened: when the novelist was really young, self-directed, for fun.
I did not do that exact thing, and actually I kind of wish I had thought of it, but that didn’t occur to me. I did do other things. I wrote some poetry – I’m sure it was quite terrible. My impression was and is that a lot of young people play with poetry, and that certainly should build a feel for language provided they are not seduced into the “ordinary prose expressing trite ideas with random line breaks thrown in” fake poetry thing that is exceedingly common these days. (I realize this indictment is a bit over the top, but on the other hand, I’m not sure it’s all that far over.) Personally, I played with sonnets and other structured forms, because I liked structured forms far more than freeform poetry. Writing a villanelle is a kind of solitaire except with wordplay instead of cards, and the rules are part of the game.
I liked diagramming sentences, too. That’s as much a kind of wordplay as writing a sonnet. I also noticed specific words and phrases, and remembered them. I learned “supererogatory” from Jack Vance – even though I didn’t like Vance’s books. I learned “chatoyant” from Cherryh. When I was just a tiny kid, I read the Jungle Books and from then on thought of the spots of a black leopard as showing through the background black of the coat “like watered silk,” even though I hardly even knew what silk was and had no idea what drops of water would look like on silk. Lord Peter Whimsey handed me, “Entrancing as it may be to wander through a garden of bright images, are we not distracting our minds from a matter of almost equal importance?”
Come to think of it, when I sat down and memorized mammal taxonomy for fun as a teenager, I bet that was also partly because taxonomy is yet another kind of wordplay, and my knack for remembering taxonomic names came from that.
Also, which I think was more important, I collected lots of poetry and some prose passages, writing them longhand in a series of thick notebooks. Those are still around for sure; they’re on a shelf in a closet downstairs. Lots of random poems, anything I happened to like that was reasonably short, because I was hardly going to re-copy the Epic of Gilgamesh. The longest poem in there, as far as I can recollect, is “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Which is a kind of extended wordplay in itself, come to think of it.
When I think about it at all, I can recall many lines of poetry from those notebooks.
If the red slayer thinks he slays or the slain think he is slain.
Does the road wind uphill all the way? Yes, to the very end.
Be in me as the eternal mood of the bleak wind, and not as transient things are – gaiety of flowers.
Lots of poems from Tolkien and The Dark is Rising and who knows what all are right there, mixed in with classic poetry. Whatever caught my eye.
What does that have to do with talent? Well, it draws a neat arrow that I think is absolutely fundamental to talent, like so:
Attentive interest at a young age —————-> Lo! Talent!
With a lot of years embedded in the arrow. Those years are where actual dedicated practice takes place, and I wonder how many professional authors practiced writing stories in their early teens? Not with a mentor, but on their own? Because I bet it’s a lot, and I also bet it’s more than it seems. If you were conducting a poll and you asked me, “So, Rachel, when did you write your first real story?” I would think about it and say, “When I was an undergrad, I think, but it might have been when I was in grad school.” But that misses the astronomical amount of practice embedded in making up stories with plots while pretending to pay some sort of attention in class, which started long before that, and I was really good at faking paying attention, by the way. If a teacher asked me a question, I could literally replay fifteen seconds of class lecture or discussion in my head and respond as though I had been paying attention when I had absolutely not been paying any attention whatsoever, which probably puzzled the teachers who could tell I wasn’t paying attention. [I learned the class material by reading the books and doing the homework, mostly.] [I have totally lost that skill, which every now and then I regret very much.]Most of that storytelling practice was absolutely ridiculous self-insert storytelling, which is of course perfectly fine and probably just about universal for young teenagers who are telling stories.
But of course a ton of young writers do write down stories, and a lot of them write fanfic, which may teach them, rough estimate, one thousand times more than they will ever learn in a classroom. I mean, not if they don’t want to learn storytelling craft. But if they do, then fanfic can be a great place to do that. I never wrote fanfic because (a) there weren’t any fanfic forums at the time, as this was way before the internet, and also (b) I would probably have been way too shy, but also, (c) I couldn’t capture the voices of other people’s characters. This is not a skill of mine. I think today I might be able to do it for some characters and stories, but I’m not sure and it might be just impossible. I’m sure a fair number of young authors still write just for themselves, though. I mean, that just seems likely.
But no matter whether someone wrote poetry or stories or both, I think that probably, as a rule, if you look at somebody who is in their thirties or above and talented at something artistic, or actually at anything, then the odds are extremely high they didn’t start playing with that thing when they were twenty-nine. They started when they were nine, maybe earlier, and if they’re talented at writing, then they started just by being interested in words and sentences, paragraphs and poetry, and then they put a whole lot of attention into practice, possibly not very visibly. This is the practice that led to their talent. And this actually ties back into the idea of excellence, because another associated concept is that the pursuit of excellence is intrinsically motivating. Not for everyone, and this pursuit of excellence can be directed in all kinds of different directions, but this is why pursuing excellence in writing doesn’t require a mentor. The actual striving to write really well was intrinsically motivating for authors who later are called “talented.” It was motivating for a long time, for years, and that’s why skilled writers got to be skilled and then people point to them and say, “How talented.”
That’s what I think explains a whole lot of talent, anyway.
Not that I’ve taken a poll. I wonder what the results would be, if someone did put together a poll like that? I wonder whether, say, Scott Alexander would say, “Sure, I played with words and sentences all the time as a kid.” If you found a significant number of people who are obviously very talented at writing but said No to a question like that, that would be a puzzle and I guess I’d have to ask, “Fine, what besides INTEREST and DEDICATED PRACTICE combined with STRIVING FOR EXCELLENCE could lead to obvious TALENT?” And I don’t know whether there’s an alternate pathway to get there, but right now, I think that’s the basic equation. With savants being an exception, and how that works I have no idea. Though I doubt very much it’s possible to have a real child savant novelist, the way you can sometimes see that for music.
***
What isn’t talent?
Desire. The desire to do something isn’t talent.
This isn’t just the classic “want to have written a novel, not write a novel.” I’m thinking of an essentially infinite number of questions on Quora that fall into this genre: “I’m thirteen and I’ve finished my first novel. How can I publish it?” “I want to publish a novel before I graduate from high school, how can I do that?” and so on.
And the only sensible answer is: Good for you, finishing a novel! Put it away and write something else, and when you are eighteen, take a look at that novel again and see what you think of it.
As a side note, for a lot of practical reasons, it’s unwise for a kid to attempt to publish a book before the kid is old enough to legally sign contracts. I mean, if the kid publishes using Mom’s Amazon account and screws up badly enough, it’s Mom’s account that will get permanently nuked, and I bet that would cause a certain amount of family friction. I also think it’s unkind to encourage a kid to self-publish some really direly terrible novel, though a self-published book can always be unpublished later, so it’s not as bad as it could be.
But my point is: The feeling that you should publish or must publish looks to me like something that is likely to specifically interfere with the long years of practice while striving to write a novel that isn’t just finished, but is objectively excellent. Where in this push to publish is the drive for excellence? To me, it looks like it drowned in the drive for speed above all. In the case of the very young author, what you have is
Attentive interest at a young age ————–> You probably aren’t here yet, sorry.
There are also a whole bunch of questions written by older people that fall into this genre: “I want to write a novel; is it okay to have more than one point of view character in a novel?” I mean, it’s some sort of question that makes it clear the person has never read any significant number of novels, or if they have, somehow they failed to notice that a whopping huge proportion of novels have multiple protagonists. In the case of the nonreader who decides they want to write a novel, the situation is
No interest until now —————-> Sorry, you are way, way, way behind the arrow.
And while the young author will probably get there if they keep moving forward and don’t get too distracted by other things in life, I think the nonreader will never get there, even if they take James Scott Bell’s class or something like that. While it’s true anyone can plug words into a story structure, it’s hard to see what they can do to overcome the disadvantage of not having paid any attention to any kind of writing craft for thirty years or more, because I’m pretty sure that —
Intrinsic interest + attentive practice + striving for excellence = talent
In writing novels as in basically a whole lot of other difficult endeavors.
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