The overwhelming majority of people are capable of running a marathon distance, even if at a slow pace. Not perhaps today, but by working up to it in a very achievable way.

Similarly, the overwhelming majority can produce a book length manuscript, even if it isn't particularly remarkable. Again, they may need to work up to it.

In this, near-perfect verbal SAT is pretty much irrelevant.

But I mean a good marathon time, and getting a book accepted by a publisher, in which there is an advance and royalties (not self-publishing).

If by publishing you mean Amazon, then yeah, anyone can do that. Even robots can. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-kindle-spam/spam-c...

"But I mean a good marathon time, and getting a book accepted by a publisher, in which there is an advance and royalties (not self-publishing)."

That's too low a bar. If you don't make the New York Times list, you're not really writing a book, and if you're not winning the Boston marathon, you're not marathoning.

Or so some would say.

I guess my point was that success in these things at a reasonable (i.e. definitely not expert) level has far more to do with perseverance than "natural" talent or physiological characteristics - you seemed to be suggesting that the latter has far more to do with it than it really does. Neither of them are out of the normal range of human capability the way, say running a 10s 100m is. People consistently underestimate what they are capable of in these sorts of things.

Ignoring the problems and gatekeeping attendant in publishers, I belive most people could write a book that a significant number of people they didn't already know would pay to read (this may fall well below the numbers that would make a publisher interested). It probably wouldn't be their first book. Similarly most people could run enough to post a decent marathon time - again, probably not on their first marathon.

The main characteristic is not "raw talent" or physiology, respectively - the main characteristic is trying, failing, learning from your errors, trying more.

I forget who said it but "talent is a pursued interest". If you pick a random person and they choose to put the time in odds are extremely good they could write an ok book or post an ok marathon time. They aren't likely to write a best seller or break 2:30 - but that's not the point.

It is undeniably true that the overwhelming majority of people will never do either of these, but that is not because they are incapable of it but because they do not choose to focus time there.

>I belive most people could write a book that a significant number of people they didn't already know would pay to read (this may fall well below the numbers that would make a publisher interested)

What's mostly missing from this discussion is marketing. Sorry, but even pretty good books will languish on Amazon (which is mostly what matters) if you just put a book out there, fiction or non-fiction, with the attitude that "If you build it, they will come." (Like most everything else.)

Unless you're a known quantity for other reasons, even getting accepted by a publisher is a tough slog and there is a long list of stories of publishers (like studios) passing on blockbusters. Not that getting in with a major publisher is any guarantee of success but cultivating a fan base as a total independent self-publishing is that much harder.

(In addition, as someone who does a lot of writing and editing, you're also probably optimistic about the abilities of said random person.)

That’s why I chose “significant number” rather than a sales figure ... the whole commercial aspect is a separable issue, imo.

I got a near perfect score on the verbal part of the SAT, but I don't see how good reading comprehension and a large vocabulary are particularly important to being a good storyteller. Reading comprehension is mostly about subject knowledge and vocabulary is something you can learn.

If you can craft an engaging story and you have the motivation to write, an editor (or a thesaurus) can help with vocabulary.

>Reading comprehension is mostly about subject knowledge

Actually reading comprehension is about everything _besides_ subject knowledge.

It's about the pure ability to understand something you've read -- e.g. to understand tone, intent, turns of phrase, idioms, writing styles, patterns, argument building, etc -- not about having some particular domain knowledge.

In other words if you read an article about a physics experiment but didn't understand it because you don't know what "spin", "wavefunction", or "interferometer" means in QM, then you don't have a reading comprehension problem. You just have a lack of physics knowledge.

If, inversely, you read an article about something you know very well in real life (e.g. baseball), but miss what the author tries to say, mistake the intent of some metaphor, misunderstand the argumentation, etc, then you do have a reading comprehension problem.

Of course to comprehend something you read you also need to be familiar with the thing it's talking about to. But reading comprehension is about everything else but that part -- it's about being familiar with the written word and the ways people express things in writing in themselves [1].

[1] "Fundamental skills required in efficient reading comprehension are knowing meaning of words, ability to understand meaning of a word from discourse context, ability to follow organization of passage and to identify antecedents and references in it, ability to draw inferences from a passage about its contents, ability to identify the main thought of a passage, ability to answer questions answered in a passage, ability to recognize the literary devices or propositional structures used in a passage and determine its tone, to understand the situational mood (agents, objects, temporal and spatial reference points, casual and intentional inflections, etc.) conveyed for assertions, questioning, commanding, refraining etc. and finally ability to determine writer's purpose, intent and point of view, and draw inferences about the writer"

Yes you can define reading comprehension to mean that. But that's not what the SAT is measuring. Reading comprehension as measured by most tests is largely about background knowledge.

https://www.education.com/reference/article/prior-knowledge-...

http://www.readingrockets.org/article/building-background-kn...

Here's a few articles on the topic with very relevant reference sections if you'd like to know more.

>Yes you can define reading comprehension to mean that.

You don't have to define it thusly, though. Whatever SAT tests test for, this is already the dictionary meaning of the term. The except was from Wikipedia.

Here's a dictionary lemma too: comprehension: "a test to find out how well students understand written or spoken language" (listening/reading comprehension).

It's not argued that domain knowledge doesn't factor tremendously in understanding. Just that this is not a reading comprehension intends to measure (heck, the hint is in the very combination of the words that make up the term).

Of course in order to understand some text in a reading comprehension test, domain knowledge will also help.

But reading comprehension is not about any particular domain -- and tests in that don't constraint themselves to only present texts about a specific subject.

Reading comprehension, as you are defining it, is not what the SAT (and most other standardized reading comprehension tests) is actually measuring. That's it. That's the entirety of my point.

generally, good writers are good readers. Competent writers have a varied vocabulary which does not come across as forced (which is often the case when someone relies on a thesaurus). I don't think too many are surprised that mathematicians get perfect scores on the math part of the SAT, so I dunno why writers scoring equally well on the verbal is different. Yeah obv. being a mathematician is a lot more involved than scoring well on a test, but it shows potential.

I don't think vocab can be taught. The reason is, vocab is very highly correlated with IQ, which is stable thought life and cannot be boosted. A large vocab requires a strong crystallized memory, which is a part of IQ. Most people when they encounter new words either are unable to infer the meaning and or forget it, but smart people do both.

>I don't think vocab can be taught. The reason is, vocab is very highly correlated with IQ, which is stable thought life and cannot be boosted.

The fact that IQ and vocabulary are correlated across a population doesn't imply that, and it's clearly not true unless you don't think someone can learn a new language later in life. Or you think that a person can learn 10k new words in a new language, but not an extra few thousand in their existing language?

>Competent writers have a varied vocabulary which does not come across as forced

Yes competent writing requires some minimum vocabulary. It doesn't require a vocabulary sufficient to score near perfect on the SAT. Most writers limit the vocabulary they use to match their target audience, so having a much larger vocabulary than your target audience isn't going to be that useful.

Especially for a lot of day-to-day writing about technical topics, ornate writing with long sentences, complicated punctuation, and SAT words is mostly discouraged. I'll slip a non-basic word in here and there but I generally keep my writing relatively short and sweet--and my editors tend to steer it in that direction as well to its benefit.

>vocab is very highly correlated with IQ, which is stable thought life and cannot be boosted.

Yet, from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient):

>Raw scores on IQ tests for many populations have been rising at an average rate that scales to three IQ points per decade since the early 20th century, a phenomenon called the Flynn effect.

Performance on standardized testing is not a good measure of writing ability. It mostly has to do with hoop-jumping, a little bit to do with ability and nothing to do with motivation. Writing a novel is exactly the opposite: it requires a lot of motivation and a little bit of ability.

I would posit that the vast majority of fiction writers test well, but very few people who test well become writers.