Over the years, many people have asked me to look at his writing. “I need to know if I have talent or not,” they say. “Then I’ll know if I should go into writing or accounting.”
Your request is seriously flawed, I would reply. Anyone can become a better writer. When I taught English composition at various universities, I saw irrefutable proof of this. Students who submitted hackneyed, half-dead essays to begin with turned in lively, well-written essays at the end of the semester. Similarly, I’ve seen many writers whose work seems simple and unimaginative get assignment after assignment from magazines, while others with dazzling wordwriting skills can’t get published anywhere.
According to Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck, she was right to question the talent question. Dweck’s book, Mind-set: The New Psychology of Success, reports research showing that in education, the arts, and business, people who believe talent is fixed and inborn fail to develop their full potential and fail to recover easily from setbacks.
Those who believe that talent can be developed, regardless of the apparent starting point, not only achieve more, but also generate greater achievement in their children and staff.
His best news: you can change the way you think about talent or intelligence. In just two months, children who were taught that the brain, like a muscle, improves with exercise saw
their math scores skyrocket from F to B.
Throw away the belief that you have a talent for writing or not. Instead, consider that publishing requires a skill set that you can deliberately learn. These abilities include:
* Be sensitive to differences between words. A good dictionary can help with this, if you consult it to find out, for example, if a “cauldron” is the same as a “cauldron” or when a gang member would be said to have “bravery” and when “bravado”.
* Recognize that getting your message across has less to do with what you meant and more to do with how readers understand the words you put together. If no one “gets it”, you should write it differently. Often this lesson is more difficult for those who feel desperately called to write than for those who have a more practical attitude towards writing.
* Being willing to put a piece of writing aside, look at it again in the cold morning light, and rearrange, replace, and revise elements of the piece of writing to tell the story more clearly and artistically.
* Have discipline to learn and apply the rules of spelling, grammar and usage. Yes, when your work is accepted for publication, you will usually have an editor who will save you from making big mistakes. But editors prefer to work with those who know and follow the rules of professional writing.
* Being able to bounce back from disappointment. In the writing business, the possibility of rejection never goes away. Successful writers learn not to take it personally for more than an hour, then just move on to the next post or next writing project.
From what I’ve observed, these five skills and attitudes are much more important to success as a writer than anything we would generally label as talent. Resolve to develop yourself that way and you will surely get somewhere as a writer. Actually!