Saturday, May 25, 2013

Talent Matters & so does Experience

As I get ready to go research my next scholarly book, a biography on Octavio Romano one of the intellectual precursors of the Chicano Movement, I realize that I'm the most confident that I have been before a big project. In some ways this should be my toughest book and yet I don't feel the usual apprehensions about my ability to do it, and do it well. In fact, I am ready to state that this will be my best book. Why? Most probably because after six books I think that I now have balanced out all my skills, and nothing I will do in this book will be new or experimental though the parts will be arranged in a way that will be creative and different. I now consider myself a master at what and how I do my work. This doesn't mean I don't still have worked to do to refine my craft nor that I should simply coast. But it does mean that I can have confidence in the things I do and can approach a project with the sense that all creative roads are opened to me.

Experience brings these feeligs of confidence. But those experiences have also confirmed in my mind that I have "talent for the game".And talent is important, possibly the most important part of being a writer. Some might argue this point and they might be right if we believed that the only thing that separates one writer from another is how many pages one writes a day, and how willing they are to rewrite and re-edit their work. But without talent all the writing and rewriting would still not produce a good work. Hard work and experience will take even a small amount of talent a ways, but it will not allow you to produce a truly good work. For that you need talent.

This may sound like a depressing point for some if they don't see themselves as a Danielle Steel or a Truman Capote. And it probaly should be if they have no talent. But my sense is that most of the people who write and even bother to read this blog do have talent, maybe even at an undiscovered level. So I'm preaching to the choir although at this stage some are ready for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and others for the barbershop quartet down the block.

For me, talent comes in one-size-fits-all quantity. That is that when people have talent, they all start out equally but then talent is developed according to time, effort and experience. The last three are like yeast to the talent dough. Once yeast is applied we may say the endproduct is bigger and yet the amount of dough has not changed, it has simply been expanded. And yet we can metaphorically call the endproduct--the bread, let's say--bigger, in the same way that we can say someone has more talent than someone else. Some people have no talent to write something beyond a grammatically correct essay. All  can learn to write to communicate but not all can write to entertain, inspire or to motivate. That is the domain of the real writer.

I've said nothing new here but I wanted to emphasize the point that writing is a talent that can be discovered, nurtured and developed but it is not one that can be "created". I say this because I often run across people who want to write great works and I see almost no discernible talent in them. I'm not being mean or dismissive, just practical. There are things I would like to do and some of it requires a level of talent that I am not willing to spend the years trying to find out if I have. It saves a lot of time if we are willing to accept that there are things we cannot do. It is also possible that we have some measure of talent but the required time to develop it to do something actually good is not worth the investment. "To each man/woman is given a talent," so says scripture, and we know some who seem to have gotten a whole lot of it, but we also know there are talents we don't have.

And talent without experience will rarely be developed to the point of doing good work.