Except I would have spelled it ‘roll’. Recently, among the writers on X someone came up with ‘The difference between a successful writer and an unsuccessful writer is practice.” Promptly someone else said: “Rubbish. Talent is inborn. You can’t make a good writer.” Partisans jumped to take up arms… or at s(words) on both sides.

And then of course there’s me. ‘Why not both?’ The problem is no one defined the terms. What is ‘successful’? What is ‘talent’? The answer, of course is that ‘success’ and ‘talent’ vary in the eye of the beholder, and both go from a scale of one to a few million…

Look, we all know the guy – at any gathering, they can tell a story reasonably well. They know how to work their audience, when the punchline is due etc. Usually, if you have the patience to follow them around, or meet them at a lot of different venues, different groups, they change and tailor the same story, to fit their audience (remember this, it’s important). They respond to cues from their audiences as well as having the probably largely innate skill to tell a good story. Well, they might have learned it from observation, from a parent… we don’t know. They do it well.

And then you have the individual (possibly more intelligent than his audience, usually with far more knowledge of the subject than his audience) who could confuse lattice packing (to use an example as by such an individual) who isn’t good at talking to people, assumes they know what he does, and starts in the middle, or the end, and couldn’t deliver a punchline with help from Deliveroo. If this doesn’t describe too many authors… we have obviously not met the same group of people.

There’s a continuum between the two extremes, of course, but I’d say people who want to write, because they love reading more than socializing… tend to skew towards people who are not extroverts. Some of them can’t, face-to-face, tell you how to boil an egg, let alone a story. Yet, they can write you one. Some of that has to be learned, because the two skills are not that different.

On the other hand, you have the natural-born raconteur… and I should guess most of them are capable of writing an entertaining story without much further ado. The trouble — and I have known several of these — is there IS no further ado, with many of them. They know they tell a good story, they know that they don’t have to ‘learn’. They just do it, play their audiences well. They will generally be at least somewhat successful. The rare one will, with no apparent effort, become wildly successful.

But seriously, almost no-one cannot improve. Me: I was the most hopeless failure at communicating with most of the universe, especially on subjects or ideas that excited me (especially as a kid. When you are shy, your understanding is patchy, you’re incoherently enthusiastic about ideas that interest you… and the other kids, and indeed adults back away… I learned to be the class clown, a joker, and something of raconteur in self-defense. It is not natural to me. I remain solitary and introverted, but I can put on a facade of it… for about half an hour.)

Likewise with writing: My first attempts were impenetrable. They had readability indexes which limited my audience to three determined people… just bad. I learned. It’s become much more natural with practice. Perhaps I will never be ‘successful’ by someone’s definition. But now I can write complex stories in such a way that young readers can follow – which is a large improvement on complex stories no-one could follow. So: yes, practice makes you better (no matter where you start). Look at me.

It turns, however, on the point I asked you to note. The problem is, of course, that a raconteur responds and adjusts around the response from his audience. The writer doesn’t have that. They have to have the ability to guess what the audience response is going to be. Some people do it well, others very badly. That skill is, I think, innate, or at least hard to learn when you can’t see the audience. I suspect it is learned… or even absorbed, from reading, and then working on eliciting those responses in yourself, from your writing. If you can’t do that, I don’t think you can be successful, by any measure of success.