The "T" Word

Recently, as all good Wavers know, The Wave-inatrix started an interesting conversation about talent. Or - it - as it is sometimes colloquially referred to in the biz. The post sparked a healthy debate and dialogue. Is talent necessary to succeed? Who decides if you have "it"? Can talent be cultivated, taught or habituated? Most importantly, is talent some kind of mysterious word bandied about to keep the competition out? Don't bother - you don't have "it". Talent is a mysteriously arrived at, exclusive quality that only writers of the highest caste have.

My opinion - and it is only an opinion - is that yes, having that mysterious facility with words and story herein referred to as "talent" is crucial to having a paid writing career. And I define paid writing career to encompass novels, short fiction, essays, journalism, screenwriting and no doubt a couple of other mediums that are at the moment escaping me. Writers who lack talent are not, in general, published for public consumption. Because editors, agents and managers of all stripes receive too much for the slush pile to pay someone who ain't got that thang.

Does determination and perseverance matter - oh god yes. But if you don't have talent, perseverance is meaningless. If you got it, you got it and you always had it. If you don't, you don't.

I think that thought is absolutely terrifying to aspiring writers.

And it is complicated by the fact that while I do believe talent is inborn from day one, it does need to be identified and groomed. If Michael Phelps had grown up in a Bedouin family with no access to a swimmable body of water, perhaps his talent would never have blossomed into more than a great eye for a distant oasis. Or perhaps like a character in a sweeping novel, he would have traveled great distances seeking open bodies of water, mysteriously drawn ever forward by a desire and dream he couldn't articulate only to later write a clumsy novel about the experience that is picked up by a publisher with an eye toward a clearly unique story, who then hires a ghost-writer to tell the Wandering Erstwhile Swimming Bedouin memoir in an entertaining way. And that, Wavers, was what they call in school a run-on sentence. But I digress.

Here's the reality - everybody has talent. For something. Music, cooking, teaching, ping pong, diplomacy, animal husbandry, organizing, motivating, salesmanship, growing stuff, making stuff, swimming - something. Everybody has a talent. But not everybody has writing talent.

And it is a matter of great curiosity for me and some indignation, that consistently, the general public seems to feel that writing is somehow easy. Maybe it's because of the way we look, or the way we often work at home in our socks, or maybe we're just so cool we make it look easy. But the perception that what we do is somehow easy and can be learned by purchasing a few books on the topic is maddening and when I'm in a bad mood - demeaning. So many writers were outsiders growing up; the freaks, the geeks, the homebodies and we were misunderstood and abused for it. And now we're cool? And now our talents are instantly accessible by dilettantes and pretenders?? That the occasional indignation that arises like hot lava. And dilettante, by the way is the word we writers use when it's gettin' ugly and we're pissed. Oh yeah, we fight with words. Gol darn it.

The thing with talent that makes it a fun and provocative topic is that it is as elusive as hell and almost impossible to define. Which is why, ironically enough, "it" is a fairly accurate word for talent. Although of course, "it" is generally used when referring to actors and entertainers meaning they have a certain indefinable charisma and magnetism.

Do you have writing talent? Maybe. Maybe you do but you don't know it because you never tried. There are plenty of stories of successful writers who started writing much later in life. The fact is that there is just no end-all, be-all definition of writing talent, who has it, where you get it and whether it can be cultivated, taught or picked up at Walgreens on sale.

Well - Walgreens is always selling out. Try Target.

Do you have talent? Yes of course you do. At something. It might be writing. It might be wood carving. You can't really find out until you try. The only thing I can note, from my experience, is that writers who claim to have it boldly and flatly and with pride, consistently give me scripts that don't reflect that. The hallmark of a talented writer seems to be - again, from my experience - a great neurotic fear that they do not have talent at all. I cannot explain why this happens. Do I have talent? I think so. But I also think writing talent - like all talent - is on a spectrum. In the blogging world, Nikki Finke is quite talented, in my opinion. There are a lot of bloggers who just blow my mind. I love this new, Wild West of blogging, a path that was laid long ago by great journalists, critics, essayists and thinkers like Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Kenneth Turan and more recently, Christopher Hitchens, James Wolcott and Anthony Lane. To leave out about a thousand others that are eluding me at the moment.

The thing with blogging is that while it is an exciting Wild West, with saloon doors flung wide open by the notable absence (in many cases) of the gatekeepers - editors - the doors flung wide open thing is a double-edged sword. Resulting in numerous belly-button gazing blogs with little literary, entertainment or educational value. Anyone can blog. Writing has become a populist notion now more than ever before. No longer is it the exclusive purview of tweed-clad, pipe-smoking editors and writers imbibing at the Algonquin Round Table.

Movies are by definition populist entertainment and it is the proliferation of movies as popular entertainment which has, in my opinion, created a sense that anyone can write one and that it's fun and easy - liking taking up golf or knitting. Is Tiger Woods talented? Incredibly. But that doesn't mean that you can't go enjoy a game of golf for the sake of the game. It just means that you probably won't receive the accolades and earn the accomplishments that Woods has. If that's okay with you - go play golf. Maybe - just maybe - you are that Wandering Erstwhile Swimming Bedouin who just hasn't had a chance to try writing but in fact, that talent was nascent within you all the time. You can't know until you try. And if you want to try - then you should.

Here is my short list, in no order, of the necessary supplies to have in your travel bag if you want to be a successful (read, paid, produced, appreciated) writer:

Determination
Perseverance
Talent
Social Skills on a spectrum from charismatic to an ability to speak to people at all
Intelligence
Curiosity
Heart
Individualism aka "voice"
Luck

It is a provocative subject, this talent thing. I have no doubt that everyone possesses it. In one form or another. Anyone - and I include myself in this - can be taught to do math. But not everyone can be a super string theorist or Albert Einstein. Anyone can be taught to swim, but not everyone can be Michael Phelps. God I'm tired of the Phelps-worship running rampant right now but he is a great example. I'm a swimmer. I love to swim. I more than love to swim, I lurve to swim. (Woody Allen reference, people, keep up with me!) but I will never, ever be an Olympian swimmer. I don't care because for me, it's just the love of the water itself. If you love to write - you should WRITE. And write and write and write. Of course there are examples of successful screenwriters who are less talented than other successful screenwriters who got lucky, who knew the right people, who were in the right place at the right time. But they have talent. Every single one of them. This I believe to be true.

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