How does the 10,000 hour rule apply to writing?
The 10,000 hour rule, popularised by Malcolm Gladwell, says that:
the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours
Now, to be a good writer, you need to be a very good reader, writer and editor.
Most of us have been reading books since we were kids, and easily have tens of thousands of hours reading practice. Yet, most readers don't become good writers.
Similarly, everyone has written emails, formal documents, maybe even a few short stories. Yet most people still suck at writing.
So how does the 10,000 hour rule apply to writing? What do we need to practice, to become experts at writing?
The thing is that people tend to confuse writing with writing. Think, for a moment, of winning a marathon or singing an …
10y ago
I don't think it does. Sure, in music and sports, public speaking and race car driving, practice makes perfect. But in m …
12y ago
I'll say it for what it's worth... The best way 10,000 hours of work translate into 'writing-work' is by getting at lea …
12y ago
John Smithers and I read the same proverb. :) In The Rivan Codex, which is the encyclopedia/slush book for David and Lei …
13y ago
Easy answer: You need to practice writing. Complex answer: You can try for decades to carve wood and assemble it to a t …
13y ago
Writing, of course. If you want to write fiction, then writing fiction. Anything else might be helpful, but it's not pra …
13y ago
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Writing, of course. If you want to write fiction, then writing fiction. Anything else might be helpful, but it's not practicing the actual thing you want to be getting good at.
Reading might give you ideas, familiarity with structure and narrative convention, etc. etc. And writing emails and blogposts might give you some vocabulary, eloquence, clarity of expression perhaps - but writing needs to do much more, and entirely differently.
Note that Gladwell says a specific task. Writing's got a whole lot of parts to it, sure, but however you break it up, there's an awful lot of those parts that really don't get exercised by anything but doing actual, real, honest-to-goodness writing. Worldbuilding, character development, crafting resonant imagery, pacing, plotting - these are all necessary skills you're not going to get anywhere else. (And no, reading somebody else who's done them is not the same, just as you can't start composing merely by listening to 10,000 hours of Mozart.)
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John Smithers and I read the same proverb. :) In The Rivan Codex, which is the encyclopedia/slush book for David and Leigh Eddings's Belgariad/Malloreon series, Eddings says (I'm paraphrasing from memory) "You want to write? Good. Write at least one million words. Now throw all that away, because your first million words are terrible. Start writing again now that you have some practice."
Ten thousand hours (of writing), one million words (of writing) — the gist of it is that you must practice the craft to excel in it. Watching ten thousand hours of Star Trek doesn't make me qualified to be a starship captain.
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Easy answer: You need to practice writing.
Complex answer: You can try for decades to carve wood and assemble it to a table; if you are doing it wrong all the time, you'll never become a carpenter.
There is another saying: You have one million words of shit in your writing. Write them down and get rid of them, then you can become an expert.
The trick is not the "writing" part, it's the "get rid of them" part. You have to learn, you have to improve. Just reading a book is not enough. You have to read it in a way, so you can learn, what the author did right, what wrong.
It's the same with the stuff you write. You need to know what's good, what's bad. You have to learn techniques to improve your writing. All in all, hard work with no definite outcome. Ask a carpenter, he will tell you the same thing.
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I'll say it for what it's worth...
The best way 10,000 hours of work translate into 'writing-work' is by getting at least 10,000 strangers that only know your work (ie. not you personally) to like one of your original works... With the rest not trailing far behind!
Alternatively: You can try to get 10,000 unique reading hours (with different readers reading different parts of the work to the very last word). That might be easier...
I know, that's strange and harsh (and kind of funny) but I felt the urge to tell it!
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The thing is that people tend to confuse writing with writing.
Think, for a moment, of winning a marathon or singing an opera. Everyone can hurry along to a degree or sing under the shower, yet no one who has been hurrying to work for fifty years or singing under the shower every morning for decades would expect to win the NY Marathon or to be hired to perform in Mozart's Figaro.
Now, returning to writing, you must certainly realize that writing, in the sense of drawing letters, is not the same as writing in the sense of having an interesting story idea, understanding human psychology enough to create believable characters, knowing genre conventions to be able to create a suspenseful and satisfying plot, and finally being able to step outside your own head and tell the story in a way that is intriguing to a sizable market share. Oh, and let's not forget a mastery of language that includes a feeling for syntactic rhythm and a general ability to form pleasant and understandable sentences.
Writing, in the sense of crafting narratives, can no more be learned by writing shopping lists, emails or academic journal articles than walking to the bus is adequate training for a marathon.
Why people tend to confuse the two is a complete mystery to me.
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I don't think it does. Sure, in music and sports, public speaking and race car driving, practice makes perfect. But in many things, such as cooking and painting and writing, passion and talent shine through more than practice. Art is more beauty than math. Writers struggle to craft their work but some of the more well-written and renowned works took no time at all to create. While some were labors of love. It can be a coin toss when it comes to art and creation as to what it takes to create it. So for writing, I don't believe that the 10,000 hours idea can be applied because everyone writes differently and you just have to find what works for you and gets you to produce your best writing.
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