I'm being lazy today, so I'm going to let Jack Kerouac answer the question posed above. According to Kerouac: "Writers are made, for anybody who isn't illiterate can write; but geniuses of the writing art like Melville, Whitman or Thoreau are born. Let's examine the word 'genius.' It doesn't mean screwiness or eccentricity or excessive 'talent.' It is derived from the Latin word gignere (to beget) and a genius is simply a person who originates something never known before. Nobody but a Melville could have written Moby Dick, not even Whitman or Shakespeare. Nobody but Whitman could have conceived, originated and written Leaves of Grass; Whitman was born to write Leaves of Grass and Melville was born to write a Moby Dick."
Kerouac continues, of course: "When the question is therefore asked, 'Are writers made or born?' one should first ask, 'Do you mean writers with talent or writers with originality?' Because anyone can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just 'talents.' Hemingway later invented his own form also. The criterion for judging talent or genius is ephemeral, speaking rationally in this world of graphs, but one gets the feeling definitely when a writer of genius amazes him by strokes of force never seen before and yet hauntingly familiar... the main thing to remember is that talent imitates genius because there's nothing else to imitate. Since talent can't originate it has to imitate or interpret... Genius gives birth, talent delivers."
(From The Portable Jack Kerouac edited by Ann Charters.)
Nice distinction between genius and talent, but what about all the genuinely untalented people out there who nonetheless are obsessed or determined enough to pound out many pages and call them a novel? Where do all the "Fifty Shades of Grays" and "Twilights" of the world, fit in? Remember, such garbage makes up the bulk of modern American "literarure."
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