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I saw another post on tumblr talking about how talent is a small factor in artistic skill and how you can get really good at anything if you practise enough and just ...

Doesn't anyone else think of talent as the thing that lets you practice enough? Like, talent isn't a trait which says "Gain +2 to checks with X" it's the combination of numinous factors that make practicing a thing feel good and rewarding and something you can spend a lot of your free time on even when there is an internet connection *right there*. So saying "Oh yeah, just spend hundreds or thousands of hours doing a thing and you'll be good at it" is true but also there are more psychological gating factors since if the first ten or hundred hours feel like pulling teeth (And IDK if you often get through that but certainly don't expect you to try if it's optional).

Is this model non-obvious to non-me people? Is it just wildly incongruous with what everyone else thinks of as talent?

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From:

potofsoup

I definitely agree with you that talent is something that makes the lower-levels of something a bit easier to get through. That said, there's power in the faith that practice plays a much larger part. I would say that I have some talent with drawing -- I'm a pretty visual person and shapes and silhouettes make a lot of intuitive sense to me. That said, colors make a lot less intuitive sense, so it's something that I have to keep pushing myself to practice if I want to be good at it. On the other hand, words, especially fictional writing, isn't very intuitive to me. Every time I try to write fic, I just feel like I'm hitting my head against a wall. Repeatedly. But I still do it, because I know the only way that I can get good at it is to keep doing it, and I feel like that's what that message is for.

I also think that certain skills are interpreted by society/culture to require more natural talent, versus other skills. As someone who likes art, it's always frustrating for me to hear someone say "wow, I can't ever draw" with the implication that they are lacking some inborn talent and therefore will not ever try. This may be sampling bias, but I very rarely hear that in regards to writing. It's often "I'm bad at writing" or "I'm trying to get better at writing." As someone who draws comics non-professionally, I encounter a lot of authors who are looking for an artist to help them realize their magnum opus, and I'm always like "but you can draw it yourself" and they're always like "but I can't ever art" and I want to say to them "but surely you didn't start out knowing how to write stories."

So yes, totally agree with you, but also different skills have different perceptions of "must have this much talent to attempt."

From:

contrarianarchon

>So yes, totally agree with you, but also different skills have different perceptions of "must have this much talent to attempt."

This is valid; I still think your writing massively understates the size of the effect that my brain registers as "talent" - on some level, I register talent as being the thing which decides what your hobby is - I can't really understand the idea that you'd do an activity for reasons other than having a note in your heart which says "This Is A Thing You Do", as least as far as hobbies go. No amount of lecturing me about how it only takes practice to get good at art is ever going to make me good at art, because I lack the spark that makes it *easy to set aside time to spend on art*. Which means I will never practice drawing. Whereas I will practice e.g. TTRPGS or reading or writing because I spend time doing and thinking about and talking about those. I'm specifically rebelling against the lesson that you can just get good at a thing by trying a lot, because "having the ability to try a lot" is not something everyone has for every skill. This is ... maybe a little bit of one of those cases where you have multiple different lessons that need to be taught to different people at different stages of their life; you need to be reminded that the hard bits get better if you keep going but I want to remind people that it's also kinda wrong to imply that the only reason people aren't all good artists is some mix of ignorance and sloth (which is how those reminders start to feel when they're the only art advice that you, a non-artist, ever see).

From:

potofsoup

Hm.... well, by your definition, my hobby isn't drawing or writing, it's "storytelling", since that is the Thing that I want to do in my spare time, which currently translates to some combination of art (which I have more natural intuition for) and writing (in which every word feels hard). Not to mention roleplaying, which I used to have time for and hope to have time for again. So what is it that ultimately drives my hobby? And how much did talent feed into my pursuit of this hobby?

What sort of advice would you, a non-artist, like to see re: art and natural talent? I'm thinking back to being 16 and having grown up in a family environment where art was just not something that people did because it was frivolous and pointless. I saw a friend draw something and thought "I can do that, too," so I went to the library to check out a book about drawing, and then bought a sketchbook that I hid from my parents and started filling it.... What advice would I have given my past self? "Hey you have talent in this so keep doing it"? "Hey if you keep doing it you'll be able to tell the stories that you want to tell"? "Hey, it's going to be hard because no one is going to take you seriously but it's worth it"?

From:

contrarianarchon

I think trying to depict someone as having a single ultimate hobby is unnecessarily reductive; people are complex and will do many things, some of which they are doing because their heart is asking it of them, and some of which they're doing for messy practical reasons, and probably there are other reasons for doing things that doesn't fit into that dichotomy.

As far as advice-i'd-like-to-see. Hmm. I'm obviously not the person who this advice is aimed at since I will for self-described reasons, probably never act on it. Probably I'd like to see more people provide practical advice or sources for practical advice with their moralizing about hard work and practice are all you need; you can also save a lot of time if you use X program and follow these tutorials, etc. Esp focusing on stuff that lowers the barrier to entry in a practical way, rather than a social way.

(The last one of those three sounds like the piece of advice I'd like most to hear about a new hobby from my future self, but I maybe wouldn't trust anyone else to give it? The first one is, according to my model of talent meaningless; talent is the thing that makes keeping doing it happen even though the world is turned against you. The second one depends on your internal state more than I know to answer.)