Whether talent is a "big deal" depends on several things - if one has it or not; how much one has; what one does with it. Take any two people, one with talent, one without, and if they put the same amount of work into the project, the one with talent will always come out ahead. I would add that the one with talent may not even have to put as much work into it to either come out ahead or at least break even with the talent-less one. Now, maybe someone with a tin ear can be taught to sing - after massive effort. We may be talking about two different things there. Or maybe that's why so many people think the road to fame and fortune is through music.
@shadowwalker, yes, I agree: the talented/gifted have it easier, no doubt about that. My point is that since many people don't have the backbone to truly work hard to improve their skills, it's often possible to surpass talented individuals simply by putting in enough effort (I know, easier said than done, but possible). The one thing I'm disagreeing with a few people here is that I believe skill gained through enough diligent and the right kind of practice can match talent when we talk about top-level professionals. Since I suspect nobody can truly prove it one way or another, I believe we just need to agree to disagree on that one. This is kinda difficult to argue in greater detail because it's unlikely to find two people with exactly the same background, so one usually has the edge over the other for whatever reason (e.g. like in my athlete example about those who've done sports since they were toddlers, basically, vs. those who start in their teens/adulthood) and it's not even always because the better one is talented, but simply because the life choices they've made, the things they have done since childhood have prepared them for thing X better than their peer/colleague, and then people mistakenly call them talented. Which reminds me of what @KaTrian brought up: why being called "talented" or "gifted" is almost an insult in Finland. At least around here it implies, between the lines, that the person doing thing X well isn't good at it because they worked their ass off to become good at it, but they were simply born with the skill, which undermines the hard work, the hours they've put in to hone their skills. Personally, I hate it when people call me talented. The only "talent" I admit to is a vivid imagination, but when it comes to guitar/drums, martial arts/combat sports, writing, drawing etc, I have absolutely no talent whatsoever, and the little I have achieved in those areas has all been the result of hours upon hours of practice, sacrifices, and hard work. To take that away from me by calling me talented... yeah, it does kinda piss me off. I'm talking about a complete no-talent, a person who can't even sing Scarborough Fair without being all over the place/off-key and turning them into singers good enough to sing in gigging bands who get paid to play clubs/parties/whatever. Yes, it takes a shitload of work and quite a while to get there, but I've seen so many real life examples, I simply can't deny it. On an unrelated note, it seems those who start early, younger than 10yo, become "gig-worthy" at around 16-18yo while those who start (practicing seriously, i.e. a few hours per day) later, e.g. at 14yo, get good enough a tad faster.
if we're dealing only with fiction, then i have to say it takes talent combined with experience... because you can have a great talent for writing, but if you're seriously lacking in life experience, talent alone won't be enough and research isn't really good enough in many areas... same [other than research] goes for if you've lived an extremely active and varied life, but have no [or too little] talent... in re other kinds of writing, talent alone can suffice, if the writer is good at research...
Just for the sake of clarity, maybe we ought to define what we mean by "talent" in this thread's context: Is it someone who's better at, say, writing fiction when they come out of the womb, i.e. there's something already in the person that makes them good writers with less effort than "normal" people? Or is it someone whose (early) life choices have given them a leg-up early on, e.g. if they read a lot when they were small children instead of playing in the sandbox (and did other things beneficial to writing fiction, like actually writing fiction since childhood)? Or is it someone who can absorb teaching easily, like nuances of the language, that there's something in their brain that makes them particularly receptive to learn languages and things related to writing fiction? A combination of the above? Or something else entirely? As long as it's not clear what people in this thread mean by "talented," the discussion is bound to get a little confusing at times. Also, those of you who can cherry-pick the texts written by talented writers from amidst merely very skilled, world-class writers (with no innate talent), could you elaborate further what specific things tell you that someone is talented and someone is not? What tells are there? Can a non-talented person appear talented (and hence match their writing level) if they learn those tells and then avoid them in their writing?
I would say it's a combination of "coming out of the womb" with a predisposition for some areas and the ability to absorb teaching (differentiated from 'studying hard'). I don't think the early childhood thing really has much to do with it - I've seen kids join sports very young who are still lousy at it years later; I've seen kids who never had the opportunity until high school become star players. I know people who've read voraciously since grade school but struggle to tell a coherent account of what they did over the weekend.
When I say talent I don't mean that's it. My dad and my brother are hugely talented artists. So was my grandfather and my cousin. I even had another cousin who showed talent but she got married young had three children and as far as I know never looked back and never continued with her art. That's the thing about talent it either becomes stagnant or it grows. I was a pretty good artist when I was young - but I gave it up to write so my drawing is stuck in the same style I had when I was fourteen. I never developed it. Talent isn't a wand wave. It doesn't mean you can automatically write phenomenal works, it means you can express your ideas better but you still need to keep developing it. You're nearly on the same level as an untalented person. Because the person who believes he has no talent might strive harder and could easily surpass a person with talent. It would be hard, you'd have to draw back to their beginning. Like a teacher who sees a child who shows a rare talent for writing in a class of writers who are only adequate. But talent doesn't guarantee a better writer - What if Stephen King has talent, but Cormac McCarthy has to rely on knowledge and practice. In the end it doesn't matter. Only drive matters.
I remember some of those bands from my younger years (no doubt they haven't changed much), when a couple of guys would get guitars, learn a few chords and voila! they have a band and made beer money on weekends. So yeah, I could see a "complete no-talent" becoming good enough for those bands. But then a lot of it depends on the subjective "good".
To T, I agree on your points concerning the martial arts. What it boils down to (who would have thought otherwise?) is that there are too many factors to every really *know* who's talented and who's not, and as you pointed out in your examples, moments of luck exist. The mysterious athleticism background is a good argument. In terms of creativity and stubbornness, I think most humans were born to mimic others. Only a few have creative enough minds to experiment and test things themselves. Everyone else learns from what's already been done. I can expand on this point, but I think if you really think about it, you might see it this view does sort of coincide with how life seems to work. To Ka, For the record, even though I think talent exists, I DON'T think it's that big of a deal. Lots of people are talented in some things to some extent, only a few are cursed to having none. I'm going to go ahead and say that talent can be a hindrance, if not nurtured properly. A talented outside fighter who never learns to fight inside? A smart kid who never develops a work ethic? Someone with a great imagination who never bothers to learn the "rules" of writing? Furthermore, I still think professionalism, as I already stated is much more important than talent. You have works ranging from Shakespeare to Hunger Games. There's a place for everyone. The hard part is recognizing and accepting your own limitations and working with them.
Erm, yeah, we're talking about different things. I mean bands who are reasonably skilled, i.e. approach the level of professionals. For instance, we played a gig with this band at one of the capital's better rock clubs, and they're pretty good, almost pro level, but not quite there yet (mind, neither are we). I'd say they are "a little" better than what you described. I'm also not saying the people in that band aren't talented, they might be for all I know, but I know plenty of musically utterly untalented people who have reached that level of proficiency through lots of the right kind of practice. And they've reached that level fast enough (usually anything from 4-15 years depending on how young they were when they started, just how diligently they practiced, how high they aim etc.) to get to enjoy the fruits of their labor while they're still relatively young. That's just an example, but do you start to understand the skill level I'm talking about? Your average picnic guitar players, campfire singers (i.e. people who just know the basics and don't really even practice) aren't even musicians in comparison. They're like first-graders just learning to read when compared to published authors who sell some of their books, get decent reviews, but not enough to quit their day jobs. @123456789, yeah, I pretty much agree about most being imitators. I do believe it's not so much about being born into a certain role (follower, imitator, whatever) as much as it's about other restrictions, such as fear of failure that keeps them from starting a new hobby even though they'd like to, keeps them from truly putting in the required effort, laziness, circumstances of life (e.g. they're too sick, mentally or physically, they have to support a family, and/or have other things that eat up all their time and energy etc), and so on. I think all "normal" people possess the inherent capacity for originality if they just took the plunge and started working to realize their dreams, but surprisingly few do.
That's close to my definition, though I think that I'd quibble about "less effort". At a purely abstract level, if two people take their ability at something to its maximum level for that person, and one person is better than the other after that process, then the one who's better is the one who had more inborn talent. And I judge "better" by the heights. If Joe writes a very fine book in twenty minutes when he's four years old, and never exceeds "very fine" the rest of his life, and Jeff writes a magnificent, world-changing book that takes him sixty years to write and he finishes when he's ninety-two, then I would still say that Jeff has more talent. But it's essentially impossible to apply the abstract rule because how do you know that everything's been done to take the ability to its maximum level for the person? So as a rule of thumb, talent tends to be judged by quality of product when measured, to some degree, against amount of effort. But that is just a rule of thumb, not, to me, the definition.
I had a whole argument lined up, then erased. Who in their right mind would want to refute such an uplifting point of view?
Or better resources. The talented person might've had a sucky teacher/study materials while the untalented person had a great teacher who customized the practice routine, gave the person time tables, short-, mid-, and long-term goals, regularly tested his progress, used the best study materials (most suitable not only for the subject being studied, but the individual studying it) available etc. Or they had the same exact teacher, practice regimen, and study materials, but the method of teaching/learning just didn't suit the talented person while it was a perfect match for the untalented person. Just bringing up, again, the importance of the right kind of practicing: you can practice for years without getting significantly better if you practice wrong. You know the adage "practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect." This is just one more thing that skews up people's ability to gauge who's talented and who's merely skilled, and this confusion/uncertainty often makes people think they see talent in people where it doesn't exist and then the role of talent doesn't match the hype. Likewise, people who have never truly practiced thing X usually don't know what goes into becoming good at it. I'm referring back to where I used myself as an example: when people call me, say, a talented guitarist, they're obviously wrong because I have no innate talent for the instrument, I've just practiced a lot and struggled to even reach my relatively low level of skill, but since many non-musicians can't really tell average musicians from good ones and they don't know what it takes to reach even my level, they think I was born with it or that it comes easily to me, which are both false If they then tell their friends I'm talented, the hype of "talent" grows. When such misrepresentations of skill/talent happen often, talent's role in learning is blown out of proportion, and e.g. I become an example of talent even when, in my case, there is none.
This discussion has made me think a bit about all this, especially about the question of how we define talent. Most people probably don't begin to express themselves in a mature sense (by taking up a musical instrument, writing, painting, etc.) until they're maybe eight or ten years old. Sure, some start earlier, but most don't, I think. (I have no data to back this up. I didn't start playing guitar until I was twelve, but I had piano lessons before that, and I've been singing as long as I can remember.) So how do we know whether what we call "talent" is inborn? It might be gained very early in life. I've been called a "talented" writer since fifth grade, but was I born with that talent? Or was it simply that I read tons of books when I was a young child? Maybe writing was easy for me to learn (to a half-decent level; I'm not published yet) simply because I knew what writing looked like. My father read to my sister and me when we were kids quite a bit, so I knew what sentence rhythms were and I knew what sounded good and what didn't. I didn't pop out of the womb knowing that; it came because Dad read to me. Now that I think about it, that's why I keep recommending to members here that they read their work aloud - I'm remembering the cadences of my father as he read to me. If we don't meet a person until they're, say, fifteen years old, and we call them talented because they amaze us with their precocity, it might not be inborn. It might be that they learned the right thing very early in life. But does that not count as talent, too? At what point, in a child's life, do we stop saying some ability stems from innate talent and start saying it was a thing they practiced? I mean, take a fifteen-year-old who wants to join the high school band. You hand him a trumpet - an instrument he's never touched before. He begins to play it, and makes progress at an amazing rate - faster than any other novice players. You call him talented. But it might be because he grew up in a musical family and absorbed the essentials of sound, rhythm, harmony, etc. through his skin without even working at it. He approaches the instrument knowing what he wants to get out of it, and knowing that better than the other kids do. Maybe he understands how to practice because he's seen his family members do it. He's talented, but he absorbed the talent from his family in early childhood - he wasn't necessarily born with it. Maybe.
I totally agree in the absorbing knowledge thing. I know of a family who for three generations, possibly more, are all musically talented. The new grandchildren are surrounded by bongo drums, keyboards, guitars etc so it's not just passed on, it's a way of life. However take my family. My dad is a sculptor, my mom likes art but doesn't really have an artistic bone in her body. I don't recall them ever reading to me. They read occasionally themselves but not a lot and not fiction. I picked up writing in third grade because a writer came and talked to the class and my teacher turned creative writing into a year long project. I loved the teacher and the project. After that however the creative writing classes became rocky or non-existent. I started reading heavily in grade 6 and writing but not steady until grade 8. I had no guides, no support from teachers, my parents were surprised by my choice and supportive, but not helpful ( my own fault my writing was carefully guarded ). I'm not saying I inherited a talent for writing. If anyone was to read my first attempts, I doubt talent would be a word they'd use. But I do think I inherited a basic creativity that really had to be whipped into shape. It's always strange that people can unquestionably inherit other unearned things like beauty, blue eyes, odd diseases - but talent always seems the questionable one.
Yes to this. But what counts as talent? Being tall is a big advantage for a basketball player; is being tall a "talent"? Supermodels make millions by being beautiful - an attribute they were born with. (Of course, they have to take care of their figures as well.) Is beauty a "talent"? I've read somewhere that the best hitters in baseball all have exceptional eyesight and, of course, great hand-eye coordination. Great hitters can make massive amounts of money, so all aspiring baseball players practice constantly, working with the best coaches they can find, maximizing their abilities in order to land a big contract. But at the major league level, some hitters are just better than others, even though the others are just as dedicated and practice just as much. Some superstars have lifetime batting averages over .33o, and also-rans never get above .220 and wind up being cut by their teams. Can you say there's no talent involved? Take two young boys, ten years old or so, and get them into Little League. Same coaches, same practice schedule. Follow them through their growth as players through high school, minor leagues, etc. Always the same coaching and same practicing. One might be a great hitter and sign a multi-million dollar contract when he's twenty, and the other will never even get a crack at the big money because he just can't hit well. There's got to be some talent in there somewhere. Talent is not a myth.
As far as I'm concerned it's any skill that comes easier than the average person. You could have a talent for cooking, drawing, handling animals, sports, climbing trees, balancing. It could be anything. I think the word talent spooks people because they think talent is limited to big things. I don't think it is. I think everyone has a talent for something but a lot have never noticed it, or ignored it, or starved it.
I'll go with experience, but talent's a close second. While I'd like to be one of those people that think talent is meaningless, that just isn't true. Some people just have an innate grasp for written expression that most others have to work tirelessly to achieve. However, it certainly isn't *everything*, and you don't have to be a natural born talent to be a good writer given that you put the work in. I chose experience because there are elements that have to be drawn from life to tell a story of substance. What could a talented person write about if they themselves have experienced nothing worthwhile or interesting? Simply put, a writer has to experience life to know what a good story could be. Knowledge and education are also important factors that can't be overlooked. To be honest, I regret even ranking these because they're all interconnected.
I was thinking exactly the same thing Why can't he post here though? OP - I'd say, to be honest, all four factors are important. Talent without experience - either writing experience or life experience - will not be able to produce a good book. I mean, talent needs to be developed and trained and where's the training if there's no writing experience? And without life experience, even the best writing in the world wouldn't resonate right with their readers. And knowledge of reality (which also comes with life experience sometimes) is important in creating believability, which leads to a good, relate-able novel. Education - well, without having read and studied other authors, without school having taught me about rhymes and poetry and metaphors and all the basic devices of writing, I would have had nothing to manipulate. Without proper schooling, my grammar wouldn't be good enough for me to be comprehensible and even the best writing in the world wouldn't save me. As for higher education in creative writing and how important that is? To be honest, education is like a toolbox - the larger your toolbox, the more tools you got, the more knowledge of such tools you have, and the better able you are to know which tool to use when, and if better alternative exists. But all the education in the world doesn't mean you can craft something that connects with people - that's where life experience is very important, and life experience is always based upon realities of the world, so I'm not sure how much these things can be separated. And without talent, well, you can write to your heart's content and be perfectly grammatical, and you'll bore everyone to sleep or to tears
I just thought of something important. Given the subjectivity involved in art, "talent" can be very hard to define properly. I may consider a particular writer to be talented, but others may disagree. Also, we must take into account the fact that the way we think about art changes over time. Someone writing in the style of Nabokov would probably not have been very successful back in the 18th century, and readers/critics would have considered him untalented. Because he was banned.
Sorry, I meant, when I said "maximum level for that person", that the person did have the ideal resources that they needed for their own development. That's a big part of why it's abstract; you can never assure that. I guess I'm saying that for me, talent: - Is based on inborn ability. - But it has to be developed. - And whether it's long and hard to develop it isn't relevant. - What's relevant is the height of what can be achieved at the end.
Neurally, haven't they found that some people have different regions of their brains more developed than other folk? I wonder if that could be a 'talent' factor.
How much elegant and real description,peachalulu!... You recently speak very realistic and philosophic and it is very nice!( although you was an able writer before)I love you comments. This the same that I believe. " Everyone has a talent for somethings"
23 Writers Who Were Famous by Age 23 I don't mind I wasn't born a talented author. One talent I was born with was an insatiable curiosity and quite a logical brain. I don't think one has to be born a talented author to learn to write well. But I don't kid myself that there aren't any genetic wonders out there.
