Do you have enough writing talent?

That's the big question, isn't it? Do you have enough writing talent? My dictionary defines talent as, “innate ability or aptitude”. Innate, of course, means that it’s already there, inherent. It doesn’t have to be earned or learned.

It’s an important question, and of course it’s one which I cannot answer specifically. It’s the one issue this website cannot deal with.

However, I can, and do, say this:

• You certainly have at least some writing talent. Fiction writing is just another way of describing the act of telling stories. And you surely have told stories before now. You have no doubt regaled friends and family with anecdotes from your life, with greater or lesser success.  
  
• For sure, fiction writing is about made-up stories, rather than real-life anecdotes. This is where your imagination comes in. Find out more about that in Creative Writing Ideas. (For now I’ll just say that you do have imagination. It’s your birthright as a human. It may be dormant now, but the resources on this website will help you access it, especially the section on EFT).
  
• Authors need both writing talent and skills. However, excellent skills and techniques - many of which can be learned - can compensate for a lesser amount of talent.
  
  My father loved tennis, for example, but considered that he wasn’t a natural athlete, and that he didn’t have innate ability at it. But he always said that he often beat players with more talent than he had, simply because he was more prepared, more determined, better practised and more tenacious than they were. I think there’s a lesson there for us all.
  
• I think that if you’re drawn to creative writing, as long as your desire to write is purely about the writing, then there’s a good chance that you have enough talent.
  
• The only way to find out if you have enough talent is to try! The market (i.e. agents and publishers in the first instance) will tell you if you have enough talent. Yes, it’s a huge investment of time to write a large project such as a novel or play without being sure you’ll succeed. However, there’s a way of guaranteeing your success - check it out.
  

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