Writing Is a Habit, Not Talent: How Mindset Shapes the Writer’s Journey

I don’t know how often someone has told me about their idea for a book, and I’ve told them they should write it only to have the next line out of their mouth be, “I would if I had the talent.”

Talented writers love to say it is about talent, but I’ve known some untalented writers who can write circles around those who come across as more gifted. The former are dabblers; the latter—no matter how hard they struggle—are writers.

Of course, you must have some writing talent. You need imagination. You need skills. You need to be well-read. You need to know the difference between a subject and a verb. Knowing all that, though, does not make you a writer. Habit does.

Writing—or successful writing, which is what I’m talking about here—is not about innate talent. It is about consistent effort, a determined and focused mindset, and plain old-fashioned discipline. What separates successful writers from all those kids we went to school with who wrote better than us is not the fact that they had innate talent (or even genius—all the teachers loved them); it is because clunks such as me wrote…all the time.

I want you to think clearly about what it means to be a writer. Let’s debunk the myth of the “gifted writer” right now. Instead, let’s look at what makes a successful writer and empower ourselves—yes, empower ourselves—to grow in our craft (and business) every day through daily practice and, as my friend Bryan Robinson says, mental resilience. Did I say “daily practice”? Oh, yes. I went there.

The Talent Myth

I’ve heard all my life about the talent myth. Kids in school had talent, so we knew they would go far (where did they go?). In college, there were favorites because those guys had talent (where did they go?). When I taught college, I heard other professors talk about students with “natural talent”; it made me cringe (where did they go?). Our society is obsessed with “natural talent,” which is another word for something that comes naturally, that you don’t have to work at (or so they think—even the best can improve), and those with it usually don’t work at (and where did they go?). Give me a guy who wants to sit down and bang out words daily, and I’ll give you a writer. Child prodigies? Tortured geniuses? Well, I’ll leave them to themselves.

Thinking you must have talent, even thinking about the silly subject, kills whatever is inside you. Don’t do that to yourself. Believing in talent alone is a nasty mindset. It creates self-doubt when you can’t pull it off easily (and if it’s coming easily, you’re not trying—don’t kid yourself). Writing is hard work for anybody, the more natural and the more challenged. It’s just plain hard. To think that you must have a boatload of talent for it (or anything) causes you to get frustrated and give up. I can’t play golf worth a flip. I must not have a talent for it. Maybe, or maybe not. Maybe, just maybe, I don’t play enough golf to make my games count. The same can be applied to writing. Stephen King, whom I did publicity for, said in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft: “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” He’s a guy who should know. That’s what I tell myself when I write something less than stellar: I may not have the talent, but at least I’m no amateur.

Writing as a Habit

Writing takes daily discipline. Yep, I said “daily” again. Like anything you want to be good at, you’ve got to do it repeatedly until you get decent and work from there. I love what Ernest Hemingway said in the Paris Review: “When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible…You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again.” When I write daily, I’m not sure it is good, but I feel filled. Maya Angelou, also from the Paris Review, inspired me by saying, “I try to get to it and stay with it. I work better in the morning. I keep a hotel room in my hometown, and I pay for it by the month. I go around 6:30 in the morning. I have all the things I need: a Bible, a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a bottle of sherry. I try to get there around 7, and I work until about 2 in the afternoon.” If she can pay for a hotel room by the month, surely, I can walk down the hall to my desk.

Just like playing an instrument, being a surgeon, or anything else, writing regularly makes you better at it, even to the point that you don’t have to think about it anymore. You don’t even have to worry about whether you have talent. You sit down, your fingers start going, and you type like you’re talking to a friend. It comes naturally. Yes, I guess whatever we want to call the muse flows if you sit down and start typing. The more you do it, the easier it is.

Habits are not something that you have to be talented at, either. We’ve all got them: good and bad. In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg says all habits have three components. The first is the cue. This trigger tells your brain to do something in automatic mode. It could be washing dishes or smoking a cigarette, but for me, it’s writing. I sit at my desk every morning around 7:30, open Word, and start typing. Truly, I don’t think that much more about it. In fact, I don’t think I ever stopped at 7:30 in the morning to ask myself if I had talent. I sat down.

The next step, according to Duhigg, is routine. That’s the typing or writing in longhand itself. This is the flow. You’re going through the process. I’m big on the first draft, and then I go back and fix it. As I write this essay, I’ll get to the end before I go back and fix anything. You can make it task-oriented or time-oriented. I might write for an hour on longer projects and then edit some. Either way, it’s a routine.

And lastly, Duhigg’s step three is my favorite: that’s the reward. I look and, low and behold, with or without any talent, I’m looking at somewhere between 1,500 to 5,000 words, depending on how my brain works that morning. It reinforces my daily routine. It makes my habit addictive. I’ve got something to show for it. I can quit the day, move on to something else, and go to bed tonight with the feeling that I did accomplish something with or without talent. I’ve got the words to prove it. And they are all even in a specific order. I crave this daily reward.

Mindset Over Myth

The best writers I know are not those who obsess over or vainly love themselves over their talent. They are writers with what my daughter’s teachers call a growth mindset. They improve faster because they try, they fail, they grow. They see failure as feedback. They see it as a fast track to getting where they want to go. I hate to say it because some might think I’m a horrible parent, but I tell my daughter to feel free to fail every day. She comes home and says she failed. I say, did you fail your best? She says yes. I reward her. The next day, she comes home and tells me she did great. But the great day wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t failed the day before. That’s just how it works.

The goal in all writing is not the perfect story, poem, essay, or whatever. The goal of writing is not to have oodles of talent. The goal of writing is like the goal of anything: show up. I know many writers. Almost all the good ones I know wonder if they are any good. Even the bestsellers I know sometimes wonder when everyone will realize they’re really a fraud. Does that sound like someone who has talent? Yes, actually, it does. They’ve got talent because they throw themselves out there and write every day.

Practical Strategies to Build the Writing Habit

So, how are we going to play this out? The first thing I want you to do, if you’ve got a great idea (and who cares if you think you have talent or not), is to pick a time and place and commit to writing something every single day. Yep, I said it again. Even if you only do it for fifteen minutes while you’re waiting to pick up your kid in the pickup line or sitting on the bus as you’re going to work, write something. Anything. I don’t care what it is. Just write. Get in the habit.

You think you need to write a masterpiece? What is a masterpiece anyway other than what a bunch of academics call a masterpiece? You can’t determine if something is a masterpiece. You can determine, however, that you write something. Just give it fifteen minutes. Lower the bar. Don’t aim for something brilliant. Just aim for something that has the words in order. And make it a routine. Same time, same place, every day.

After you’ve done this a few times, start tracking your progress. Write down your word counts. Make a note on your calendar, a secret symbol or checkmark, that says you showed up even if you only wrote ten words. Anything to show you’re building a track record. Do that, and you’ll start seeing amazing things happen. You’ll begin to notice amazing things about yourself, the least of which is that you’ve got talent. And the more you do it? The more talented you become.

Writing, like anything other than breathing and getting hungry, isn’t something you were born to do. It’s something you become by doing it. You’ve got talent. I don’t know how much natural talent you’ve got, but whatever you’ve got naturally, don’t rest on that. Make it a disciplined habit, and you’ll be shocked at what comes out. Don’t wait for inspiration. Start writing today. Fifteen minutes instead of listening to the stupid news in the pickup line. Fifteen minutes, with pen in hand, write your heart out in a journal. You’ll see incredible things start to happen, and the next time you get an idea, you won’t be looking at someone like me and saying, “I’ve got a great idea.” Instead, you’ll take it to your secret place and write it. Why? Because you’ll realize you have talent, and you’ve had it all along. Dorothy, click your red slippers. You’re on your way.