While usually impossible to define, to me, I should elaborate. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
Talent, to me, refers to technical skill. It means doing things that are difficult to do, that enrich and challenge yourself to make yourself better, that challenge the reader/listener and help them become better readers/writers/entomologists, etc. It means sometimes taking an avant-garde approach to theory and stretching the boundaries of "rules", without necessarily having to break them. Talent can refer to taking some cliché and making it unique.
But being able to shred well isn't true talent. Being able to play all the chords well isn't, either. Knowing all the scales isn't. Having a truly well-rounded knowledge of all the aspects, and then bringing it to a higher level is. This usually relates to something around 17 years in martial arts terms, of training.
Sometimes this refers to brilliant prose. Other times it refers to a very good concept, depth, and character development woven into a tapestry of plot.
Well, I know diddly squat about music, I only know what I like (and I have zero musical talent). I do practice martial arts and I understand your comparison there. (And no, I'm not talented.) But I think I know writing. So I'm going to ask an obvious question: have you
read Stephen King? Or just dismissed him out of hand because you know he's a huge popular author whose books are made into really bad movies (With a few exceptions, like
The Shawshank Redemption)?
I can talk about King extensively, though that's not really the purpose of this thread, and I'd strongly disagree that he's a "shredder" or whatever the writing equivalent is. He has turned out some crap books, I won't deny it (there was a long period in the 80s/90s where he's admitted that most of the time he was writing while stoned out of his mind -- though ironically, some of my favorite books of his are from that period), but if you've read his books, I think it's apparent that he's not just spewing words and retelling cliches, and he does have a writer's attention to the craft. (He also needs a firmer editor sometimes, but that doesn't make him a bad writer, it makes him a self-indulgent writer, which many writers are guilty of. I could say the same thing of Dickens.) If you've read his non-fiction, like
On Writing and
Danse Macabre, it's obvious that he takes writing very seriously. You may not
like his writing, which is a perfectly valid matter of taste, but to say he has "no technical skill" is insulting, and to say that he's only popular because he appeals to the dumb masses is insulting to his readers.
That's why I asked you to explain
why you think he's a bad writer. "I didn't like this and this and this in the books of his I read" would be an opinion I'd respect, even if I disagreed with it, but "Popular = bad writer" isn't. (And no, of course I don't think being popular automatically makes you a good writer. I'm perfectly comfortable stating that I think Dan Brown is a bad writer, but I've
read some of Dan Brown's writing and can say why I think so. It's not just because he writes big dumb potboilers that become big dumb movies.)