How Do You Know if You Have Talent?

You just know, dahling. And if you can write an amusing forum post that makes sense off the top of your head, you probably do. Heh, dive in and prove it.

If you've got it you've got it. There's nothing to it.

Hi Deborah811 - Look around here at the forums and then after you have a bit of an idea how things work (be sure to look at stickied items at the tops of forums), move on to the Share Your Work Forum (password protected but open to everyone) and take a look at the types of works people are putting up there to be critiqued. Read the initial posts and then look at the critiques. If you're not intimidated, post a short selection of yours in whichever of the genre specific share your work forums is most appropriate and see what kind of comments you get. That should help you have an idea pretty quickly. But again - before you post, be sure to read the advice for newcomers and other stickies in the Main Share Your Work Forum - doing so can save a lot of problems and heartaches. Good luck and welcome to AW. Puma

Here are some options:

1) Have a teflon/kevlar ego and just beleive it, failing that you need to make someone else believe it, e.g.:
2) Take a course and get an A+
3) Get published and sell many copies
4) Enter and win competition and awards

Yo Deborah

I took the liberty and read some of your blog which I found entertaining.

I think we all need some form of validation in our lives and writers are no different. Stick around and pitch in with some posts just to get a feel for this place.

It certainly makes sense to offer up something in the Share Your Work sections - however be careful not to take some of the comments to heart. They are someone's opinion and that someone may have a quite different outlook to the world than the one you have.

All the very best to you and keep writing

Well, you've got a good start on the humor forum. Such humility, too. Welcome to AW. Nice thing about this place is, is that you might end up having to beat the mentors (here) off with a stick. We do like our fresh ones.

Tri

The only person who can tell whether you have talent is you. Simple as that.

Just, you know, post and read here. Everyone here is always so willing to help, this place is the best!

I think you have to believe in yourself and just go for it!
You'll never know if you don't try, and even if you try and some don't like it, don't give up, just find your audience.

Although it doesn't hurt when other enjoy it now does it!

Love the six toed cats thing. Hilarious! =) I would say you have talent. Just belive in yourself . . . it will carry you far.

shannonmac said:

I think you have to believe in yourself and just go for it!
You'll never know if you don't try, and even if you try and some don't like it, don't give up, just find your audience.

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But . . . if they're on Neptune . . .

caw

WannabeWriter said:

The only person who can tell whether you have talent is you. Simple as that.

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I wish it was that simple. The only way you can be sure that you have talent is when your readers tell you that you have - and by that I don't mean your family and friends!

Of course there's no point in writing unless you believe in what you're doing and above all learn to trust your own voice.

Hi, deborah811, and welcome to AW!

deborah811:
Honestly, how do you know if you have talent?

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Define "talent".

Some people have an instinctive gift for writing well crafted fiction. (It's okay to hate those people ).

Most people (IMHO) can learn how to produce something of a publishable quality with the right tools and enough dedication.

For me, talent is over-rated. The key is stamina - you need to keep plugging away at your craft, honing it and refining it until you make it across the finishing line.

This comment was brought to you by a variety of cliches that should never be used in fiction.

MM

Momento Mori said:

The key is stamina - you need to keep plugging away at your craft, honing it and refining it until you make it across the finishing line.MM

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Stamina being the operative word! But how do you define the finishing line? Is it when you write THE END or when someone -agent, publisher (and by publisher I mean a reputable one!) - takes notice of you?

Having completed my first novel I agree that stamina is way up there and I was surprised just how much effort had to go in to structuring the novel so that various bits of plot and sub-plot came in at the right time and in the right way. Time will tell if I have got that right; previously published efforts have been short stories and poetry which required a lot of work in their own way too, but of a different kind.
As far as talent goes - like beauty, it's in the eye of the beholder. I have complete strangers rave about my work yet others snub it, similarly there are authors whose work does not interest me in the slightest but they are on the best seller list. Have faith!
I was told once that success is talent multiplied by effort but if you have zero of one of these - well you know what happens when you multiply anything by zero...

Jill:
Is it when you write THE END or when someone -agent, publisher (and by publisher I mean a reputable one!) - takes notice of you?

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I think it's a two-stage process. You need to actually finish a novel first (which is an achievement in itself). Then you need to hone it until a publisher decides to buy it. And if a publisher doesn't want to buy that novel, then you need to write another one. So it could be a three-stage process or whatever.

Obviously there are writers out there who aren't interested in publication and are writing for themselves (and I'm not criticising that in any way) and there are writers who decide to self-publish (and I'm not criticising that either), but if you're looking for an objective baseline, then money talks and you've either written something that a publisher is prepared to pay more than a dollar for or you haven't.

I think that some people get hung up on the idea that you have to be an artist or someone who creates fabulous prose that brings tears to your eyes (or whatever) in order to make it as a writer. But there's a wide market out there and for every Salman Rushdie there's a Dan Brown. Each of those authors has crossed the finishing line regardless of what someone may personally believe as to whether they have talent.

Just my opinion.

MM

Momento Mori said:

For me, talent is over-rated. The key is stamina - you need to keep plugging away at your craft, honing it and refining it until you make it across the finishing line.

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I agree completely. Persistence trumps talent.

deborah:

Welcome to AW!

I fully understand what you are saying. The road to publication is so long, with so much work (improving craft, learning story-telling, researching agents/editors, understanding the industry, learning the craft of letter writing, etc.), that you don't want to go down it until and unless you know you have some chance of success that depends on you and not on chance. I've been there, and to some extent am still there.

Unfortunately, I don't see any easy answer to this question. Critique groups, in real life and on-line such as here in "Share Your Work" have limited value. You don't really know if the people critiquing you know more than you, or if they "have it". Paid critiques at writers conferences, I have found, are not worth the money, because the critiquers rush through a bunch of them quickly and critique by rote, rather than by the true pros and cons of the piece. Beta readers are good, but you still have the concern about how much they know. Beta readers who are not writers, but who are in your intended audiences, may tend to overlook faults that would kill the piece to an editor. Beta readers who are writers may tend to focus on the trees and not help you with the forest--at least that's my experience.

So it seems to me about the only ways to know if you "have it", the talent to achieve publication, are 1) pay a mentor, 2) have something accepted for publication, or 3) the accumulated evidence of critiques, which includes comments from editors.

I have yet to find mentors who work for free, but possibly you'll find one. Many successful writers who are not quite earning enough to be full time will mentor for a fee. This takes a lot of research on your part, and possibly some luck of timing.

Beta readers who are writers don't work for free either. This normally requires reciprocity: you want someone to read your work in progrees, you must reciprocate and read theirs. So the cost is your time. Beta readers who aren't writers will do it for free, but these tend to be your colleaques and family, which somewhat diminishes the value of their critique, unless they can be truly honest.

Having something published before you know if you "have it" sounds a bit like an oxymoron. But maybe, while doing the work for the book-length piece, you can also pursue publishing shorter works in regional markets. Acceptance by them, while not guaranteeing anything, is some feedback for your decision making process.

To me, the best evidence is accumulated comments from agents/editors. If you submit your work to them, and receive feedback, this will really tell you something. Even a form rejection letter tells you something: the work wasn't good enough for the agent/editor to take the time write something personal. But if the agent says, "Your writing is strong, but I just don't know if I can sell this book," and if you hear something similar several times, then you probably do "have it", and just need to persevere.

Good luck,
NDG

Momento Mori said:

Some people have an instinctive gift for writing well crafted fiction. (It's okay to hate those people ).

Most people (IMHO) can learn how to produce something of a publishable quality with the right tools and enough dedication.

For me, talent is over-rated. The key is stamina - you need to keep plugging away at your craft, honing it and refining it until you make it across the finishing line.

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Personally, I think it takes a combination of talent and persistence to see the job done.

Talent is the ability to put a spark into the work that speaks to the viewer/reader on some universal level. Persistence is the ability to learn the craft needed to do the work, not to mention doing the work itself. Craft without spark is just fabricated boring. Spark without craft is incomprehensible.

I've known several people with massive talent. One fellow I knew could whistle a pretty good orchestral performance of his own compositions, but he couldn't be bothered to learn how to read or write music. He was also a very talented artist, but wouldn't be bothered to display any of his work outside of his apartment. Not even on a website. Likewise, in my 30-odd years in writer's groups, I've read a lot of pages where there the sentences were well-constructed, even beautiful prose, but there wasn't anything alive on the page to care about.

How do someone know if they have talent? Honestly, I think that it's in the eyes of the stranger who experiences your work. If you can connect with them on that gut-emotional level, then you've got it.

deborah811 said:

Hi,

I am new to all of this - not the world, mind you, but the writing world. Honestly, how do you know if you have talent? Must I move to Key West (can't afford it), get some six-toed cats (allergic) and start drinking a lot (that I can do here), in order to really be a writer?

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You can write.

The moment I realized I might actually have talent was back when I was about fifteen. I had somehow gotten in my head that I was going to write the most amazing spy thriller of all times. (Don't ask where that idea came from; Ian Fleming I am most definately not.) Well, I let some of my friends read my masterpiece-in-progress, and they loved it - except they thought it was the most amazing parody of a spy thriller they'd ever read. I was supremely ticked off until I realized Wait a minute. They're reading it. They're laughing. They're loving it. They're begging for more.... That was when I first started thinking I might be able to write something worth reading after all - albeit not what I'd intended....

I've always known that I have the ability to string words together into logically coherent sentences. That's easy. However, I still don't know whether I can do so in an entertaining manner. That is, after all, the point of writing.