Talent for having talent

George Saunders, about whom I blogged earlier, wrote a great editorial in the Guernica magazine in October 2006 about the process of writing..

..talent is only the beginning - the essential thing is having a talent for having talent. You have certain abilities, certain defects as a writer: how do you accommodate these? There are certain things you can't seem to do - what form can you invent to circumvent these things? You have certain fears, obsessions, neuroses, patterns of thought and speech - can you let these into the work, accepting them as part of the wonder that is you, and accepting the wonder that is you as part of the greater wonder that is the world? Or do you lunge back to the shore, taking comfort in the conventional?

The young writer is called upon, in other words, through work and craft and persistence, to take the raw talent he or she has, and force it into some deep, dark corners...to try to wrest from "mere" talent a kind of iconic originality...to confront the parts of himself or herself that, in the early days of a career, one thinks can be ignored, or overcome, or hidden under a mattress somewhere.

But no. Turns out, everything must be used. So it's interesting to watch this process unfold. ...

Read more at the original. Its a pretty good editorial and points to some other good upcoming writers.