Has it Been 10,000 Hours Yet?

After Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, the Story of Success showed 10,000 hours of practice equaled genius, I felt good. After all, I’d been writing almost that long, so genius and success should lie just over the next rise. A few more hours to go. 

Then along came Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, author of this article in Scientific American, saying the 10,000-hour rule doesn’t apply to creative fields like fiction writing.

Now you tell me, Doc.

His rationale makes sense, dang it. To become a genius at an activity requiring repetitive motions—oboe playing, bricklaying, pizza-making, etc.—the 10,000 hours seems logical. Some of that is creative play, but much is building muscle memory and learning more advanced techniques.

But purely creative endeavors—music composition, art, and writing—aren’t like that. Muscle memory won’t help. Spend 10,000 hours typing and retyping Sense and Sensibility, and you’ll end up a fast typist. But your skills as a novelist won’t have changed.

The article counts 10,000 hours of practice (also called the 10-Year Rule) as one factor in creativity, but gives that number a wide error band.

The author cites several other factors of importance to creativity. Unfortunately, a writer lacks control over some of these factors, such as talent, personality, genes, and socio-economic environment.

Lucky for us, the article provides some aspects of creativity lying within our control. For example, Dr. Kaufman states that creative people often use messy processes. If you’re the neat and organized type, you’ll have to work on correcting that.

The author says creative people take interest in a broad array of things. If you write fiction, consider writing stories outside your normal genre.

Too much specialized expertise, says Dr. Kaufman, detracts from creativity. Often, he says, people outside a field contribute the fresh insights and creative solutions. As writers, we can take care not to become overly specialized, and each of us can claim outsider status in something.

I give the doctor credit for identifying personal attributes that influence creativity, but I don’t believe you’re stuck with whatever creativity you were born with. (Nor did he imply that in his article.)

You can increase your creativity. I believe you, and all of us, were born overflowing with creativity. However, society’s pressures to conform squeezed much of that creativity out.

You can get it back through regular exercise. Here’s the exercise to try. Think of a problem. If it’s a fiction-writing problem, maybe you’re stuck for an idea, or fell into a plot hole, or need a character motivation, or seek a setting description. The problem could be anything.

Now start writing solutions as they occur to you. Include stupid ideas, impractical ideas, zany and magic ideas. It doesn’t matter—no one will see your list. Often very good ideas only emerge after thinking of dozens of bad ones first.

Yes, you may call it brainstorming. Unlike normal brainstorming, though, you’re doing this alone. Also, unlike normal brainstorming, you’re seeking more than just a good answer to your problem. You’re trying to stretch your creativity muscles. You’re retraining your mind to free it from a cage built long ago to hold it.

Maybe you’ll run dry after ten listed solutions, but I encourage you to push on. It might help to consider this–back when you were five years old, you could rattle off fifty ideas without slowing down. That’s the childlike creativity you’re looking to recapture.

If you aim to be a writer, forget about the 10,000 hours, the 10-Year Rule. That’s for others. You need creativity, and no clock or calendar can give you that. Let your inner kid loose again, this time to skip around in the infinite playground of your mind where milliseconds equal millennia and a pace is as good as a parsec.

And, there he goes, the five-year-old version of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

Improving Your Creativity, Habit by Habit

Each of us is born creative. Some lose their creativity along the way. If you’d like to write fiction, but don’t think you’re creative enough, I believe you can increase that attribute through effort.

Researchers Carolyn Gregoire and Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman developed a list of habits practiced by creative people. In their book, Wired to Create: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, Gregoire and Kaufman introduce and discuss those habits.

However, if you’re trying to improve by practicing good habits, it’s difficult to work on ten all at once. In his self-improvement efforts, Benjamin Franklin tackled just one habit per week. Therefore, I took the ten habits from the Gregoire and Kaufman book and rated them according to how important they are to becoming a better fiction writer. That way you can concentrate on one at a time in your creative journey.

I’ll present each of the habits in reverse order of importance, like any good Top Ten List. The order of the list is mine; other authors might disagree. Each habit is important, and all worth doing. You’ll find you do some already, so you won’t have to work on those.

10. Turning Adversity into Advantage. It’s good to develop your ability to accept failure as part of the process, to learn from it, and to move on. As a writer, your stories will get rejected; some of your books won’t sell; some marketing ideas won’t work; your stories will receive bad reviews. You’ll need to use these misfortunes to improve. As important as this habit is, I judged it the least necessary for developing the type of creativity needed by fiction writers.

9. Solitude. Writing fiction is a solitary endeavor. Creative people need to be able to tune out the world’s noise, to enjoy being alone without feeling lonely. That can be difficult for extreme extroverts. Still, it didn’t rate high on my list, since it’s not a habit you’ll need to practice before you can write. Just write, and you’ll soon get used to being alone.

8. Intuition. As you assemble words into effective sentences, expressive paragraphs, and enjoyable stories, you won’t have time to reason out what works best in every case. Most often you’ll have to go with your gut. This habit is low on the list because it’s hard to practice (try setting out to be more intuitive today) and because it should develop naturally the more you write.

7. Daydreaming. All writers do this. They let their mind wander in unfocused thought, free to go where it will, perhaps to see things anew or to connect the unconnected. The only reason this habit isn’t higher on the list is its low degree of difficulty, for most people.

6. Sensitivity. It’s valuable to be aware of the world and to understand the connections between outside events and your own mood and feelings. You can use that ability to create characters readers will love. For some, this comes naturally but others have to work on it.

5. Passion. There has to be an inner fire, some powerful force driving you to tell a story, to sustain you through the times when writing seems too hard. It’s not an easy habit to practice, though. Moreover, once you experience the success of selling a story, your passion to write more will increase on its own.

4. Openness to Experience. Your muse must be fed, and her diet is experiences. You have to get out in the world, explore new places, meet new people, try new activities, break down the doors of your comfort zone. This is easy for some, but others have to work at it.

3. Mindfulness. A creative person can focus, can think about the world, can think about feelings, and can think about thinking itself. Unlike daydreaming, this is directed, intentional. This is the usual state of writers when writing.

2. Thinking Differently. Creative folks disdain norms, shun convention, and strive for originality. They adopt a unique perspective, and break out of the everyday. Fiction writers must do this, to craft stories that will interest and delight readers. There’s a reason they call them novels, after all.

Drum roll, please. And now, the #1 habit of creative people, the one most important to fiction writers…

1. Imaginative Play. Remember your childhood games? You’d build crude replicas of things that would be huge and perfect in your mind. You’d imagine situations, assume a role, and play it out. No constraints, no rules, no limits. Your mind would ask, “what if…?” and off you’d go. Fiction writers either never outgrow that habit, or find a way to renew it through practice. It’s the essence of creative writing.

You already know what to work on, don’t you? You’ve identified the most difficult habits on the list and you’re set to practice them. Soon you’ll be tapping into hidden reservoirs from which your creative juices will flow. Good luck, Writer, and please take a moment along your wandering, creative journey to leave a comment for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

December 10, 2017Permalink