Against Talent
What is talent, anyway?
It’s a tricky thing.
As a kid, I had a natural inclination toward writing. That is not to say I was good at it, just that I was interested by it. I was into the look of words on a page. I enjoyed the feeling of putting ink on paper. I mean, before I actually knew how to write my letters, I would just scribble line after line on blank paper and pretend to be creating a masterpiece. Why? Well, mostly because I couldn’t draw or do any other creative activity particularly well, and I needed some way to entertain myself.
That’s not exactly talent. After all, once I did learn to form sentences and whatnot, I still seriously struggled to make things up. Plot completely evaded me, actually, so how is that talent?
In the fourth grade, I got really into diagramming sentences. It was just so satisfying to pull apart sentence structures and see how they worked. It was, I’m sure, the same kind of thrill future surgeons get from dissecting their first frog — oddly magnificent and compelling — it draws you in intellectually, and there’s the added bonus that you find yourself rather good at it. But is that talent?
Even if it is talent,what’s that worth?
I’m asking because more than once now, people have told me I had this thing called talent. I appreciate that. It’s a nice thing to say. But you know what? Talent doesn’t get you a job. Talent doesn’t pay the bills. Talent is just a starting point, and furthermore, some successful writers apparently don’t have what we would call talent. That is, they didn’t find they had a natural affinity for subjects and predicates. Instead, they read something amazing one day and felt they would never be satisfied until they wrote something equally amazing, so they tried and tried, got countless rejections, got called all kinds of unkind things, and then finally succeeded. What they have is drive.
Is drive more important than talent? Yeah. I think so. But talent helps … whatever it is.
The trouble with talent is this: When you’re a kid, if someone tells you you’re talented, you internalize that, you believe it, and you add that word to your self-image, the standard to which you will hold yourself for the rest of your life. If you believe you are talented, you will find it hard to face the struggle that comes later — talent or no.
Tags: grammar | talent | writing
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3 Responses to “Against Talent”.
Very good points.
The hard thing for me was, putting words together in a semi-eloquent way came naturally from the time I learned more than two words. Every time writing or speaking was a big part of what I was doing, I excelled. That’s not to brag, because we are all talented in one thing or another. Mine just happened to be conveniently useful — because what school assignment besides math worksheets, from kindergarten on through college, doesn’t hinge on putting words together? It didn’t seem fair, really. My lab partner was smarter at biology, chemistry, and physics than I was, and I got slightly better grades. My reports were better.
The hard part was once I decided writing was going to be what I DID. Being semi-eloquent wasn’t enough anymore, tons of these people are semi- to super-eloquent. It went from a pretty good advantage in a generally marketable sort of way to an underdeveloped advantage in a very specific market.
And yes. Drive. I really feel like I miss out on a lot when I let my drive and focus slide. I think that’s the great thing about keeping in touch with a community of writers. We can all help each other along. I know a bunch of writers who could do some pretty amazing things.
“It went from a pretty good advantage in a generally marketable sort of way to an underdeveloped advantage in a very specific market.” <— yes, exactly. Sure, it helps in elementary school, but once you start calling yourself “a writer,” the competition gets a lot tougher.
Really, really thought provoking! Something that I have hanging above my desk is a ven diagram – one circle says ‘where you are,’ one circle says ‘where you want to be’ and the intersecting bit says ‘lots and lots of hard work.’
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