Does Talent Matter?
Of course, but also, not really.
Because the Chicago Bulls are resurgent I’ve been watching a lot of NBA basketball again, which has gotten me thinking about talent.
At any given time there are only 450 active roster spots in the entire NBA, but in a typical season due to various factors (injuries, et al…) over 500 players see game action. Because of the complications of the coronavirus requiring COVID-positive players to sit out, by December, a record 541 players had seen game action, many of them through 10-day contracts, which allow teams to acquire a player’s services without signing them for the entire season. 1
One player, former University of Illinois standout Malcolm Hill, scored 13 points playing for the Atlanta Hawks against the Bulls on December 29th. On January 17th, Hill was playing for the Bulls, splashing in 10 points against the Memphis Grizzlies. Hill is a 26-year-old rookie, and without the pandemic would likely have never seen action in an NBA game, but if you watch Hill play you see an NBA player.
If you were to come across Malcolm Hill in a gym pickup game, even against accomplished high school varsity players who would definitely consider themselves serious ballers, he would dominate.
If you doubt this, check out a video of 40-plus-year-old ex-NBA journeyman Brian “White Mamba” Scalabrine destroying a solid high school player in one-on-one. Scalabrine had an 11-year NBA career, but played, on average, fewer than 50 games a year. He had 1594 career points, a total that Bulls star DeMar DeRozan will hit about 3/4 of the way through this season alone.
After Scalabrine finishes humiliating the young fella he says, “I’m closer to LeBron than you are to me.”
The massive gap in talent between even a very good amateur player and an NBA professional, even a fringe one like Malcolm Hill, is difficult to fathom. But so is the much smaller, almost infinitesimal gap between someone like Malcolm Hill, who will struggle to stay in the NBA, and Ayo Dosunmu, a Bulls rookie who looks like he may be on his way to a long and productive career.2
What’s this have to do with books?
I’m getting there.
When I was teaching introductory creative writing courses to undergraduates, I would declare with full confidence and belief that “talent doesn’t matter.”
Obviously, this is untrue. Talent makes a huge difference when it comes to success at writing and basketball and all kinds of other things. Some people are supremely gifted. Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks, two-time MVP and NBA champion, is called “The Greek Freak” because of his unbelievable combination of size, speed, coordination, and strength.
Also, because he’s from Greece.
I have brushed up against this kind of talent in my life as a writer and I am here to tell you, great talent is apparent. During my graduate studies at McNeese State University, I overlapped with Adam Johnson, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize (The Orphan Master’s Son) and the National Book Award (Fortune Smiles), and seeing his stories while they were in progress (the equivalent of watching a basketball player shoot hoops in the gym) was an amazing thing. His work just had some spark or quality that was special. Everyone in the program was talented - 5% of the people who applied were accepted during that era - but Adam was next level.
Talent definitely matters, but I was not lying to my students.
What else matters?
I have been making my way through Jami Attenberg’s new memoir in essays, I Came All This Way to Meet You, which also got me thinking about talent. If you’ve read Attenberg’s fiction (The Middlesteins, All Grown Up, All This Could Be Yours), you know Attenberg’s talented, but her life is the story of tenacity, an internal knowledge that she is a writer and a drive to make that internal knowledge external reality. In an essay published at The Guardian, she writes about what happened when speaking to her creative writing professor (a National Book award winner) and telling him that she was going to be a writer.
He said to her, “You know, honey, not everyone makes it as a writer.”
In the immediate aftermath she reeled, but she also says now:
For years I have used this story as inspiration. He told me I couldn’t, and yet somehow I did anyway. He was an older man, negative and condescending. I’ll show him, I thought. But it is only recently that I realised that moment was actually radically freeing. I was probably not suited to be a writer in the way he thought was important. But that did not mean I was not suited to be a writer.
Attenberg arranged her life around the goal of being a writer, even when the possibility of it looked slim, and bit-by-bit with successes and setbacks a plenty, she achieved it, but even so, there’s no finish line. She says, “Things have gotten a little easier as time has gone on, but still I never relax.”
The most successful writers I know have that belief, that tenacity to pursue their work, to retain confidence even when doubt is knocking on the door. Adam Johnson worked on The Orphan Master’s Son, a book with a premise - (a story set inside North Korea heavily featuring work camps) that would not make a publisher’s heart go pitter-patter - for eight or nine years, never being fully confident it would even make its way into the world.
Giannis Antetokounmpo was raw and scrawny when he entered the NBA at age 19. He averaged fewer than 7 points per game his first year. Now, he’s one of the 75 best NBA players of all time.
This is what I told my students: Talent is necessary, but it is not dispositive, and the only way to discover how much talent you have is to work as hard as you’re able.
It is this belief and tenacity that I most admire because it is the trait where I am personally most lacking, at least when it comes to writing fiction. I have a hard time convincing myself that I can make a novel good enough to be published. As a reader who writes, I sometimes have to sit back and marvel at the mini miracles that are these books that capture my attention and spirit so thoroughly.
The odds…my goodness the odds could not be more against any of these things coming into existence because not even talent and tenacity are enough.
Time
Declaring that sufficient talent and hard work are all it takes to be successful would also a damnable lie. The firmament is littered with talented, hard-working artists whom you’ve never heard of.
Another necessary ingredient is time, which is perhaps the hardest thing to come by in today’s world.
In 2010, The New Yorker featured the top 20 under 40 fiction writers, the young(ish) writers they felt were most promising at the time. As of 2021, those 20 writers had collectively published only 32 works of fiction in the decade since their selection. A couple of them have not published any book of fiction since being chosen.
They clearly do not lack talent. These are amazing writers. Without tenacity they wouldn’t have wound up on the list in the first place. I think what we are looking at is a combination between the sheer time (under the best of circumstances) it takes to write a high quality work of fiction, with people who are in the period of their lives where they’re most likely to not have that time because they are teaching or having families or trying to establish a base of economic security that allows them to do their work.3
Jonathan Franzen, a single man who makes his living as a novelist takes, on average, between six and ten years to write a novel. How is someone trying make it from assistant to associate professor while bringing a couple of kids into the world supposed to also dedicate the time it takes to their art?
There is a book coming out in March that exemplifies the challenge of time and how patient careful work can overcome it. I feel like I have been watching Maud Newton write her forthcoming book, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation for better than a decade, because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.
Newton, one of the original book bloggers, has been sharing bits and pieces of her journey in conceiving, researching, writing, and publishing a book that I’m certain will prove to be extraordinary. She’s worked at this project while holding down a day job, living a life, meeting all its challenges, and as someone who has been observing from afar, it is thrilling to know that the results of this process are almost here.
(If you want to know more about Ancestor Trouble and read some other of Maud’s writing, check out her free Substack newsletter.)
Opportunity
If only talent, tenacity, and time were sufficient. Writers (and pro basketball players) also need opportunity. Ayo Dosunmu is such a great story because not much was expected of him this season. A second round draft pick who was viewed as limited on offense, prior to injuries and pandemic-related absences, he got spot minutes off the bench. But as he’s played, he’s shown a savvy beyond his years, successfully integrating himself into the Bulls team game and becoming a fan favorite. Ayo just needed a chance to show what he could do.
There is a wonderful new book out that demonstrates the intersection of talent, tenacity, time, and opportunity necessary for art to be brought into the world.
I first became acquainted with Taylor Harris reading her submission to the 2012 McSweeney’s Column Contest co-judged by me and the main site editor Chris Monks. The contest would receive maybe 1500 entries and we would select five as winners that would be featured on the site for a year.4
Our judging method was for both of us to read through the entries, sorting into the “No,” “Maybe,” and “Yes” piles. The entries that got two Yesses were rare.
Taylor got two Yesses. Her column “Big Mom on Campus: Raising Two Kids in a College Dorm,” is the story of her return to her undergraduate alma mater (the University of Virginia) with her husband Paul who was working as a professor and mentor that required them to live in one of the campus dorms. Her essays on how race and class and privilege play out at “Thomas Jefferson’s university” were funny, perceptive, and fresh, and I was certain were the stuff of a book as I said to her at the time.
But life had other plans. At twenty-two months old, her son Tophs starts displaying mysterious symptoms where he seemed perfectly fine some days, and absent, lethargic and confused others. This Boy We Made: A Memoir of Motherhood, Genetics, and Facing the Unknown tells the story of Taylor and her family as she pursues an answer to what’s happening to her son. It’s another book I feel like I’ve been waiting for for a long time.
The talent Chris Monks and I immediately perked up to is evident and then some. At last, Taylor Harris has had the time and opportunity to share her work with the wider world. I cannot recommend the book more highly.
Sometimes I think it would be simply more comforting to believe in genius, that art is the byproduct of exceptionally gifted people who throw off their works like Zeus birthing Athena from his forehead. That way, I’d be off the hook as a writer, reader, and teacher. My job would be merely to sort the brilliant from the ordinary and sit back and let them go.
But that’s not how any of this works.
Thank goodness. How uninteresting would that be?
Links
My Chicago Tribune column this week is about the books that were so profoundly affecting at different times in my life that they reoriented my sense of the world, including, Bridge to Terabithia, Mrs. Bridge, and Thick.
Also at the Tribune, Christopher Borrelli writes about the life and writing of Gary Paulsen, an author of adventure stories for young readers. Hatchet is probably his best known book.
A fun piece from Sara Schwebel and Jocelyn Van Tuyl writing at Slate: “The Newbery Medal Is 100. It’s Smuggled Some Real Duds Onto Our Library Shelves.”
Friend of The Biblioracle Recommends, Lincoln Michel, ponders the rise of the “speculative epic,” a multi-genre, multi-timeline, sweeping novel. (Think Cloud Atlas.)
The New York Times is recommending 11 new books this week.
Electric Literature has a list of new books from “writers over 60.”
I linked previously about some shenanigans going on at the Niles Public Library. Stuff is still going down and folks are organizing against it.
The Book Maven, Bethanne Patrick, has an interesting list of “15 Books You Won’t Regret Rereading.”
Recommendations
All books linked below and above are part of The Biblioracle Recommends bookshop at Bookshop.org. Affiliate income for purchases through the bookshop goes to Open Books in Chicago.
Affiliate income stuck at $15 for two weeks in a row. Remember that I’ll match any total up to 5% of the annualized revenue for the newsletter or $500, whichever is larger as a donation to Open Books.
The list of 2022 recommendations will be filling up week by week.
Recommendations are always open. Send in your requests by clicking below and following the instructions.
1. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
2. The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule
3. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
4. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
5. The Chestnut Man by Soren Sveistrup
Natalie M. - Fullerton, CA
I think Natalie will find herself captured by Penelope Fitzgerald, particular her novel, The Bookshop.
1. Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Rivka Galchen
2. Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty by Anderson Cooper
3. Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart
4. All's Well by Mona Awad
5. Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel
Evelyn A. - Chicago, IL
Here’s a coincidence, both Riva Galchen and Gary Shteyngart are on The New Yorker “20 Under 40” list referenced above. Why not lean into that and recommend a book by another from the group? At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcon.
1. Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit
2. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World by Steve Brusatte
3. What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell
4. How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
5. Slum Virgin by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
Mary B. - Williamsburg, VA
This is a book club pick, which I’ve always said ups the pressure. I’m going for a book that might not be universally loved, but is one that you can’t help but talk about: My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
Paid subscription update
A little under 8% of the current number of total subscribers have a paid subscription. If that number reaches 10%, revenue will be sufficient for me to pay outside contributors for additional content every month.
Whoo boy, that was an epic! Sometimes you just get on a roll.
Have good weeks one and all!
JW
The Biblioracle
A player can only sign two 10-day contracts with a team per season before the team has to either cut him loose or sign him for the full year.
Dosunmu also played his college ball at Illinois. Dosunmu’s best year he averaged 20/6/5 (points/rebounds/assists). Hill averaged a very comparable 17/5/3 in his best season. Dosunmu was drafted in the 2nd round. Hill was undrafted.
I am for a much more robust governmental support of artists in ways that would allow them to dedicate more time to their work. The marketplace is fine, but if art is your goal, it is not the best mechanism to support the cultural production of artistic works.
We’ve had some winners of the contest go on to much bigger and better things, including Vinson Cunningham who is now the theater critic at The New Yorker, David Hill, author of the truly wonderful, The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America's Forgotten Capital of Vice, and Casey Plett, a Lambda Award winning author of the novel, A Safe Girl to Love.