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

Writing and the Outlier Theory

In a previous blog post, I mentioned Malcolm Gladwell and his book Outliers: The Story of Success.  In it, he explored why some people seem to stand out as geniuses in their fields–what made them so good?  His conclusion was that success requires two things:  (1) Luck, and (2) 10,000 hours of practice.

There’s not much we can do about luck.  Gladwell suggested it was a matter of being born at the right time and being exposed to the right influences.  When it comes to luck, you either have it or you don’t.  If you have it, ride that wave, baby.  If you don’t, well, reconcile yourself to the fact that not all books sold are written by the greatest writers of all time.  And know this, too:  there’s no way of knowing in advance whether you are lucky.  Only time will tell.

Although we can’t alter our luck, we can do something about the 10,000 hours.  Well, not shorten it, I’m afraid.  But we can accomplish it.  We can devote ourselves to it.  If you spend 10,000 hours honing your skill at one thing, it’s highly likely you’ll become good at it.  Perhaps not great, but good.  And you may grow to enjoy that activity, such that the idea of the next 10,000 hours doesn’t frighten you, but thrills you.

Gladwell goes on to discuss what the 10,000 hours should consist of.  Many of those hours should be devoted to freeform play where failure has a low cost.  There should be a lot of experimentation and attempts at trying out different approaches without any external criticism.  Examples he gives in his book include hockey players, musicians, and computer pioneers.  But you can see how his theory applies to writers.

For writers, the 10,000 hours is spent mostly alone, writing.  The freeform play consists of many attempts at stories of different types, many drafts that get discarded, many early tales of poor quality.  The 10,000 hours should include some study as well–research into the mechanics of writing, research into how great writers plied their craft.

At this point you might be thinking of examples of great writers who didn’t have to spend 10,000 hours perfecting their skills.  Okay, there might be a handful.  And you might end up being one.  If so, great!  But do you really think you should assume that you’re going to be one of that very rare breed that achieves greatness without a lot of work?

Yes, I’ve done the math.  I know that if you can only devote three hours a day to writing, you won’t reach 10,000 hours for over nine years.  But for most of us, there’s just no way around that.  And you need to remember that much of those 10,000 hours are spent in enjoyable play.  It needn’t be all drudgery.

So those 10,000 hours won’t happen by themselves.  If you want to be an author, get moving.  The clock’s ticking and the calendar’s flipping.  Oh, and if you know some sure-fire shortcut, please send it to–

                                                      Poseidon’s Scribe

September 11, 2011Permalink

Shortcut to Greatness?

When we watch magicians perform, we’re smart enough to know there’s no real magic involved.  We know there’s a perfectly logical trick.  In fact, we’re sure if that magician would only reveal the trick to us, we could do the act too.  Magicians guard each trick with great care so that knowledge of how they do it doesn’t spoil the show.

Think it’s the same with writing?  What if we could beseech a great author to teach us his tricks, reveal the secrets she’s been concealing?  “Make me a best-selling author, too,” we’d say, “I don’t care if it takes all day!”

I’m not a best-selling author (yet), so for all I know they are withholding the secrets from us, hoarding their tricks and special knowledge, unwilling to spill the beans and open themselves up to a little more competition.

If those no-good, stuck-up top shelf authors really are keeping secrets from us, then they’re not only guilty of that, but of lying as well.  Writer after writer has claimed there are no secrets, other than hours and hours of practice.  Writers as diverse as Isaac Asimov, Janet Evanovich, Stephen King, and Tom Clancy all say there are no shortcuts, no simple tricks, and no keyboard sleight-of-hand moves that will make you a great writer.  W. Somerset Maugham said, “there are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”  Apparently the number of rules is three, though, so that’s progress.

In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell claims the secret to genius-level greatness in any field is a combination of luck and a lot of time spent practicing.  How much time?  Gladwell says around ten thousand hours.  Yes, ten thousand. That’s a lot more than the solid afternoon we were hoping to devote to it.  More like fourteen months, continuously, without sleeping.  If all you can spare is two hours a day for your writing, then you’ll need nearly fourteen years to achieve greatness.

At this point, you may be yearning for some easier path.  What about writing courses, writing conferences, workshops, how-to books, critique groups, and the online versions of these?  I’ll give my perspective, having tried many of them.  I think all of these aids have value, some more than others.  In particular, I believe critique groups have been the most beneficial for me.  However, it’s important to embark on each one with the right attitude, the correct level of expectation.

If you pay for a conference, a how-to book, etc. thinking you’ll emerge out the other end as a pro market author, I suggest you ratchet down your hopes a few settings.  Each of these venues is fine to partake on an occasional basis to learn different viewpoints, refresh knowledge you might have forgotten, etc.  But make you a superstar author?  Doubtful.  Not impossible, just improbable.

There are expenses involved with each of the venues, too.  On the other hand, the long hours of lonely practice are nearly free, except for the amount of time spent.  I urge you not to fall into the trap of thinking that just because the last writing course (or workshop, etc.) you took didn’t result in instant success, surely the next one will.  Now that I think of it, I’ve never heard of a Great Author attributing his or her achievements to a how-to book or a conference, or any of those things.  Many of them do talk about reading a lot, especially reading the classics.  But they all say there is no substitute for writing, writing all the time, writing constantly.

So maybe one day some successful author will take you down a winding staircase into a hidden hideaway, enter the little-known combination into the locks, swing wide the series of creaking vault doors, and open the chest containing the secrets to easy writing greatness.  If you know those secrets, e-mail me here.  Until that day, I suggest practice.  But what do I know?  I’m just…

Poseidon’s Scribe