Talent, part 3

For the past couple weeks, I’ve shared some of my thoughts on talent and what it means for writers in general. But so many of us think we’re not part of “writers in general” because someone at some point has told us our writing was so terrible we should just delete it, bury the thumb drive, and never think about writing again.

Full disclosure: I don’t remember anyone whose literary opinion I respected telling me that what I wrote wasn’t good. If anything, I got way too much praise as a kid for my writing talent instead of my perseverance and skills. I do, however, remember how hard it was when I got to college and I was expected to actually revise my work. One person’s “This isn’t perfect” is another person’s “This is an ugly dumpster fire that should never see the light of day”—and it can be hard to see the potential in a first draft if you think “real” writers are so talented they magically produce perfect writing on the first try. (And they don’t. Many famous writers who’ve produced exquisite work also have horror stories of some admired author eviscerating their work.)

Personally, I don’t see the point in telling someone to stop writing even if I think their writing is awful. If they don’t want to write, the lack of external validation combined with lack of internal motivation will make them stop writing. And if they do want to write, they will—and the practice they’ll engage in will probably improve their writing over time. Even if it’s a long learning curve and they’re terrible at it for years, the marketplace—of agents, editors, or readers themselves—will weed out bad writing. Heck, it even weeds out a lot of good writing!

So I tend to be suspicious of people who go out of their way to tell someone else not to write. It’s not really my business if Jerkface McHackster is writing schlock, so if I tell him his writing sucks, that says that something about the writing has engaged something in my personality—which all writers want. Sometimes a fledgling writer’s ambitions outstrip her current skills; that can be annoying to a mature writer who isn’t as daring with his own current work. Or an admired writer can be ruminating on how conventional and bland books are today, have a conversation with a new writer, and trash his current project because she’s projected her complaints about the literary marketplace onto something new and unfinished.

The truth is, even if your writing does fall under the conventional-and-bland category, nobody has ever written what you’re writing. It isn’t an equation that has a definite, correct answer that someone else has previously discovered, and it doesn’t have a blueprint that will instruct you as you work. That’s not to say that we should aim for conventional and bland, just that those labels—or terrible, or hackneyed, or embarrassing—shouldn’t scare you away from writing. If you’re wrestling with your WIP, that doesn’t make you a bad writer or not a writer at all; it means you’re truly engaging with the work you’ve chosen.

Also, as painful as it can be to experience the taste gap, it’s an important part of any writer’s journey. You see the flaws in your work because you have the potential to do better; otherwise, you’d think the whole thing was perfect.

Finally, transitioning to a growth mentality can help any writer become better. With a growth mentality, you focus on what you can do to improve, not on whether you’re innately good at something (particularly since innate talent can be very hard to measure). It’s not like saying, “I can’t put more water into this glass—it’s not big enough!” It’s more like turning on the sprinklers and watching the grass grow.