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Hi!
If there was one question I got asked more than any other when I was working as a developmental editor, it was do I have talent?
It took me a few years to realize what they were really asking me. They wanted to know if they were going to be able to make it as an author. Were they good enough? Did they have what it takes? Or was it a waste of time and effort for them to keep trying?
Most of the time, this question came from writers who were near the beginning of their journey, usually having completed their very first novel. They wanted me to tell them, from this early work, if they showed signs of promise, of this magical thing called talent that would mean they could be a writer.
Even though I most often heard this question from newer writers, I know authors farther along the path also wonder about this same thing.
So today we’re going to look talent in the eye—the facts, the myths, and what it means for us as writers.
The first question we need to answer is what we mean when we talk about talent.
Defining Talent
We’re going to go with the definition that Anders Ericsson gives in his book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise:
It is one of the most enduring and deep-seated of all beliefs about human nature—that natural talent plays a major role in determining ability. This belief holds that some people are born with natural endowments that make it easier for them to become outstanding athletes or musicians or chess players or writers or mathematicians or whatever. While they may still need a certain amount of practice to develop their skills, they need far less than others who are not as talented, and they can ultimately reach much greater heights (208).
To put this another way, do some people have an innate ability that they were born with that will allow them to become excellent writers while those of us born without this innate ability have no hope of ever becoming as good? Moreover, are some people able to develop their writing skills more easily than other people?
So what we’re not talking about here is monetary success. There’s a lot more that goes into that than the talent question. We are strictly talking about the quality of writing we will be able to achieve.
To answer this question, we’re going to look at what the best and most current scientific research tells us. Guessing won’t help us. Neither will counting noses in the writing community. Everyone has opinions. Let’s see if we can find some facts.
The Role of Genetics
We do know that some skills have genetic components. Physical size is genetically determined, for example. If you’re the wrong size for your sport, your chances of success are almost nil. Gymnasts need to be small. Swimmers need to be tall. When I was eighteen and trying to decide what instrument I wanted to learn, my first thought was the cello. But I’m 5’1”, and I have child-sized hands. I didn’t have the physical reach I needed. I took up the violin instead, and I still needed to do daily stretching exercises on my left hand in order to play a full-sized violin. My hands placed a physical limitation on what instrument I could play well.
Some people are tone deaf. This term gets thrown around a lot, but it’s actually rare. If you’re tone deaf, you can’t hear the difference between two different notes. People who are tone deaf will never become musicians. The length of your vocal chords also plays a limiting factor in the range of notes you can hit as a singer, so that puts a limitation in place.
For skills that require certain physical characteristics that people are either born with or aren’t, we definitely find a limiting factor. No amount of work will make you taller or give you longer fingers.
Writing, however, isn’t one of those skills. There’s no physical requirement for being a writer. You don’t even need working hands or working eyes to write, not with today’s technology.
This means that in deciding whether writing talent is something we either have or don’t have, we need to look elsewhere.
Lessons on Intelligence and Chess Grand Masters
IQ is another quality that appears to be mostly inborn. A person can improve their IQ within limits, but if your IQ is 90, then you’re not going to be able to raise it to 130. So in some sense, IQ is fixed.
Because IQ is something people are born with that isn’t “physical” per say, it sounds like it could be a closer match for us in deciding whether innate writing talent is a real thing.
Researchers have studied IQ’s relationship to chess players—from children learning in school clubs up to grand masters—and IQ’s relationship to Go, a more complex game than chess due to the number of potential moves. (I can’t do footnotes in a newsletter, but you could look at the 2006 study by Merim Bilalic and Peter MacLeod of Oxford University and Fernand Gobet of Brunel University as an example.)
In children, they found what most of us would expect. The children with higher IQs were also better chess players.
But that correlation disappeared when researchers studied adult chess players, including Grand Masters. Not only were their IQs no higher than poorer chess players with a similar education level, but they also didn’t score any higher on visuospatial ability. In other words, they couldn’t find any innate reason the Grand Masters were better.
This result was born out again in studies of Go Masters. Go is such a complex game that Masters can easily beat even computer programs (unlike in chess where the computer usually wins). Studies here found that Go Masters actually had slightly lower IQs than the general population.
All of this goes against what we would naturally expect, so researchers dug deeper. Bilalic and his colleagues created a follow-up study to look at intelligence and practice time together. Their initial study had only looked at IQ and visuospatial ability. This time they measured memory, verbal intelligence, processing speed, and practice time (when they began playing, an average number of hours spent practicing per week, and what kind of practice they were participating in).
What they found has an essential message for writers.
All the natural, inborn abilities (“talent” if you want to call it that) that people were born with only mattered in the beginning. The more intelligent people who had higher processing speeds and better memories picked up on the skills more quickly, so in the early years they were better than their less “talented” peers.
But here’s where things get interesting. Because they didn’t excel as easily, the chess players without those natural abilities practiced more. Because they practiced more, after a few years, they had surpassed the players who’d seemed at the beginning as if they had an edge.
Anders Ericsson found a similar result when he studied violin students at the Berlin University for the Arts, one of the premier schools for musicians in the world. When they tried to figure out what separated the good violinists from the very good from the great, they found a clear difference in the number of hours spent in focused practice. The good students had practiced an average of 3,420 hours, the very good students an average of 5,301 hours, and the great students an average of 7,410 hours.
What about prodigies? you might ask. Don’t they prove that some people are born with natural abilities that allow them to surpass others? Don’t they prove that no matter how hard you practice you still need talent to be truly excellent?
Prodigies, it turns out, are a bit of an urban legend. When you look into the histories of prodigies, what you find is that they started earlier, practiced more, and often had skilled teachers earlier in life than non-prodigies. In other words, they weren’t born with their skills. They simply developed them early through hard work.
The Bottom Line for Writers
Here’s what we can take away from this: The natural abilities that might contribute to writing ultimately do not matter.
What matters in the long run is that you keep practicing and don’t give up.
Remember, we’re only taking about the quality of your writing here. Monetary success in the writing world involves many, many factors. But if your goal is to become an excellent writer, then you need to stop worrying about whether you have “talent” or not and put in the work to learn the craft.
Even if talent exists, the people without it who work hard will surpass the people with talent who don’t.
In the upcoming months, we’re going to be talking a lot more about how to practice most effectively. Not all practice is created equal.
Until then, happy writing!
Marcy
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