Is there a cap on talent?

navigating the post-debut hangover

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I am back with another heavy topic about accepting the limits of your own writing. But before I dive into that, a lil debrief about launch! It was truly an incredible experience, made better by the wonderful staff at Barnes & Noble Philly (where you can pick up signed copies of my book!), my awesome conversational partner Jo Piazza (whose novel The Sicilian Inheritance is out this week), and the many friends who trekked here to see me from California and New York. It was like a wedding, I kid you not.

It also felt like really great timing. I was initially concerned that the launch was coming 2 weeks after the official publication date, but it was the perfect amount of time for me to get over all the angst of having my book out there (more on that later) and felt like a fitting send-off. In short, I discarded my perpetual worrying and just let the tides of enthusiasm and joy carry me away, and I had a spectacular time. I have tried to maintain that attitude by not reading my reviews, not looking at how many ratings I have, and really soaking in every positive DM or post that I get tagged in. The result has been very positive.

Anyway, get yourself a copy of this book! It’s out now and you can probably find it at your local bookstore!

For anyone reading this who hasn’t published a book, it must sound so ridiculous that I’m caught up in these things when I’ve achieved the big thing! I got my book published! But publishing has brought to the fore many ideas and misconceptions I’ve carried my whole life about writing and my own abilities.

One of the big beliefs I used to have about writing is that my writing ability was capped. I would read some authors’ writing and despair at ever being able to construct worlds as expansive and detailed at theirs, or at being able to capture the humor and malaise of living the way they did through their dialogue. I could never do that, I thought, and consequentially, I believed that I would just never be able to arrive at some universally accepted level of good.

Sometimes I get comments telling me how “talented” I am. These comments make me feel like a chosen one who has lucked out with some indescribable ability that has allowed my writing to rise above others. I have never thought of myself as talented because nothing has ever come naturally to me. I’m the girl who swings the bat and misses, who studies twice as hard for an exam but ends up scoring the same as the people who started the night before, and who adds a little too much salt to cookies and ruins the whole batch. It’s preparation, practice, and recipes that have helped me.

That’s not to say that I don’t feel a bit of magic when I write. Describing it to a friend, I wasn’t really able to explain why, when I begin typing, I am able to think up dialogue on the spot or feel like I’m flying behind my characters as they drag me to places unknown. I once heard from an artist that she must begin painting on her canvas in order to figure out what her piece is going to be, or else she will never finish anything. That’s how I feel, sitting in front of a blank page. I need to start typing in order to see the path. Is that what “talent” is? It feels utterly arbitrary, trusting in a fickle muse who can desert you at any moment. Also, I usually axe eighty percent of a first draft anyway. Most of my process is committing to sitting down, not getting distracted by anything, and fighting self-doubt. I have to think critically, research, make spreadsheets, gather feedback, and prioritize in order to arrive at a coherent draft, and those are things that take practice.

Now, after seeing Women of Good Fortune join the ranks of other published books, I am wondering again how much of writing is talent and how much is the honing of craft. Since it was acquired, the question that I was terrified of having answered was: how will this book be received by the public? Its popularity, its online rating, its mentions on social media, its SALES; suddenly, there were a multitude of ways to measure this book quantitatively, which is definitely worse because you can argue with some bad reviews, but you can’t argue with cold, hard numbers. I let myself believe that it was these numbers that would determine how good, how talented a writer I was.

I was also fully aware of the other books that published at the same time, and from there, I could chart their parallel paths and find new ways to make myself miserable. Up until now, I had been on the inside of this journey, but now I had reached this diverging point where I was both experiencing everything as an author yet aware of how I would observe books like mine as a reader and reviewer. To give you an example, as a reader, I would often go on Goodreads and look for books with over 1,000 reviews and a 4+ star rating. That was how I decided what to read. And to learn that my own book didn’t fit the bar I had set as a reader was a bitter pill to swallow. My strategy as a reader was not the fairest. I have definitely picked up books I’ve loved that didn’t fit the standards I’d set. Now, I have to remind myself that reader Sophie would have picked up Women of Good Fortune, purely for relatable characters and the promise of a good time.

If there were a PhD in ways to make yourself feel bad, I think I would graduate with flying colors. After everything—writing and finishing a book, revising said book, querying literary agents, going on submission TWICE, editing a book with a professional editor within an inch of its life—I still felt like a hack.

After a week of this angst, though, I realized that I was confusing talent with my ability to imitate other authors. I cannot take another writer’s voice, and I have spent a lifetime defining my own. My “talent” might be static, but it’s given me a starting point. Everything else is a product of my own work and my appetite for experimentation, and there’s something liberating about not being constrained by some innate thing I was supposed to be possess. I found that when I pulled away from the online discourse and started working on something else, my body relaxed. I felt at peace for the first time in a long time. It was the peace of creation, of doing something familiar yet new. For the first time in a while, I realized I would not want to switch places with anyone else, because that would mean I’d lose my voice, and that is the one thing that is undeniably me.

Something I wrote today:

If they asked for my identity, I would show them my student ID. I’d already passed the first test of showing up at the bookstore and getting it printed. Afterwards, I’d examined the blue plastic card, marveling at how such a cheap object so easily given would now guarantee my passage into forbidden places.