How do you define talent?
You've heard of "girl math" and "boy math." Now get ready for "artist math."
Picture it.
You’re ten years old and your fifth-grade teacher just announced an upcoming school Christmas talent show and is asking for volunteers to sign up. A buzz of excitement rolls through the classroom. Jack’s going to play “Silent Night” on the piano. Laura’s going to sing “O Holy Night.” Jennifer (one of the three in your class) is going to do her Sugar Plum Fairy dance from her dance class’s yearly production of The Nutcracker. Tray’s somewhere in the back talking louder than everyone about how he’s going to play “Jingle Bell Rock” with armpit farts. He’s already started practicing.
You sit quietly in your seat as the thrum of excitement passes through you. But then you remember, you have no talent. Your brother threw a shoe at you the last time you tried to sing along to Mariah Carey. When you were eight you tried dance class, but your dance teacher pulled your mom aside and told her maybe you should try soccer. You wrote a poem once, and you were proud. But when you read it aloud to your family, your Aunty said maybe next time write something more jolly, “you’re bringing the mood down.” Your mon looked at you with concern and wondered if you needed to see a counselor.
When we were young, this is what talent meant to us. It meant you could put on a performance. It meant you could entertain. It meant that you’d been born with something inside you that made you special and magical. People wanted to watch you on stage and applaud you.
When we got older, we realized the meaning of talent stretched further than the confines of performance art. You could be talented at math. You could be a talented writer (you revised that poem, sent it to an emo literary magazine, and found the validation you craved many years later). You could throw paint on a canvas, catch shadow and light and shape and your art teacher stood over your shoulder and said “You’re talented.”
But still, even as our definition of talent expanded, we clung to this idea that talent was something already inside you, that you were either born with or not.
Even as adults, sometimes we can look at our contemporaries, at those who make it far in the same fields that we’re in, and we think to ourselves, “I wish I was that talented.”
I spent most of my youth wanting to be a writer but never having confidence in anything I wrote. Whenever I looked at my work, I never considered it good enough because I would compare myself to those I looked up to. Jane Austen. Charlotte Bronte. I came up short every single time. I hesitated to share my work, to show anyone any part of it, because I was afraid that I wasn’t enough. That my writing wasn’t worth sharing. Who would want to read something that didn’t sound like Jane Austen?
Before I had the courage to show my work to strangers, I started writing and publishing fanfiction. Fanfiction to me was always the playground I could visit to learn and to take the weight off everything I wanted to be but couldn’t because I wasn’t talented enough.
I started sharing my work with people who didn’t know who I was, and whose judgment wouldn’t hurt as much when they read my subpar writing. Instead, I found that many did enjoy it. No one called me “the next Jane Austen,” and no one said, “People will be reading this fanfic for centuries to come.” But I did get “I binged this whole thing in one day. I’ve gotten up only to pee. OMG. WTF. More please.” And I realized that was enough.
One reader once did tell me, “You’re so talented.” But acutely aware of how many hours I’d spent editing a certain chapter, how many scraps of paper I’d thrown away, how many versions of that chapter actually existed, I said, “Honestly, it’s so much work it doesn’t feel like talent.”
That’s when I realized it. Maybe there’s no such thing as talent. Not the way we understand it, anyway. Maybe there’s no such thing as being born with a magical gift that was bestowed upon you by fairy godmothers at birth. I mean, was Jack perfect at piano? No, he probably pressed at least two wrong keys that night at the Christmas Talent Show. Laura’s family was definitely smiling through their teeth while she stood up there and clambered up the higher notes of “O Holy Night.” And Jennifer C.? She’d been practicing that routine for months prior to the talent show announcement, and practiced it some more in the weeks leading up to the school’s talent show. Her feet probably looked like something out of an R-rated horror movie after the show. And let’s be honest, in today’s world Tray would go viral playing Jingle Bell Rock with armpit farts.
In a discussion with my good friend Brittani from
, I came to the conclusion that talent isn’t just showing up good at something. There’s a combination of things that need to be in place first. Like an equation. Curiosity + Drive + Passion = Talent.Yes, there might be something magical bestowed on you before birth or right after. Maybe it’s genetic. Maybe it’s from being exposed to a certain craft from a young age. Or maybe it’s just plain curiosity that leads you to it. But without this calling, without this inherent need to want to know more, how would we find that thing that sings to us when we do it?
Then, of course, you need passion and drive. You can have all the curiosity in the world, all the family members, close relatives, and teachers to take you by the hand. But until you pursue it for yourself, until you spend countless hours doing trial and error, it will never be a talent. Sure, Chef Ramsay likes to yell at people that they’re an idiot sandwich, but I can guarantee that he, too, was once, perhaps a very, very long time ago, an idiot sandwich himself. Chef Ramsay did not come out of the womb making the perfect Beef Wellington.
We are talented if we want to be. If we know we’re doing the work, if we know the work we’re doing matters to us, if we know that even when we’re good at a craft there’ll always be something new for us to learn, then boom! We’re talented.
So allow your confidence to pour in. No one can take away the hard work you consistently put into honing your art. Do the math. If you know you have the variables in place, then, my dear, you are talented.
(Also, please, never call anyone an idiot sandwich.)
Music rec of the week
I may have mentioned before how I’m almost completely incapable of writing/being creative without music. I need music at all times. This is not an exaggeration. Without music, I’m not sure my creative neurons even know how to act.
When I first discovered Lord Huron’s “The Night We Met” a few years back, I added it to every playlist I’d ever created. Needless to say, I quickly grew tired of it. It’s still on all those playlists, but I sometimes skip it because I’ve worn it out. However, while listening to a random playlist the other night, I came upon this instrumental version, and I’ll be damned if my creative neurons weren’t connecting again and having a little waltz party up inside my head. It was perfect for the tone of my story and the scene I was writing. Maybe it can do something for you, too.
quote of the week
This quote says it all. We can call any sort of skill a talent. But without the curiosity and the willingness to pursue that curiosity, talent is nothing.
Hi there, I’m Maria! I’m a freelance fiction editor assisting women writers in amplifying their voices through their writing. You can find me on Instagram @theintuitivedesk. Or visit my site
www. theintuitivedesk.com to find out more.
I’m also a writer currently working on too many novels at the same time. You can read some of my past writings here.
This newsletter is free, but if you would feel inclined to leave a tip, I would be grateful for your support.