You Can Be a Winning Writer. Joan Gelfand
New Yorker columnist, pop psychologist and bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell wrote Outliers, a book that proves the thesis that it requires “10,000 hours to master a skill.” The phrase went viral. Thinkers, musicians, artists, and writers who read Gladwell’s book agreed. Here is an excerpt from an article that Gladwell wrote when his theory came under fire:
“Forty years ago, in a paper in American Scientist, Herbert Simon and William Chase drew one of the most famous conclusions in the study of expertise:
There are no instant experts in chess—certainly no instant masters or grandmasters. There appears not to be on record any case (including Bobby Fischer) where a person reached grandmaster level with less than about a decade’s intense preoccupation with the game. We would estimate, very roughly, that a master has spent perhaps 10,000 to 50,000 hours staring at chess positions…
In the years that followed, an entire field within psychology grew up devoted to elaborating on Simon and Chase’s observation—and researchers, time and again, reached the same conclusion: it takes a lot of practice to be good at complex tasks. After Simon and Chase’s paper, for example, the psychologist John Hayes looked at seventy-six famous classical composers and found that, in almost every case, those composers did not create their greatest work until they had been composing for at least ten years. (The sole exceptions: Shostakovich and Paganini, who took nine years, and Erik Satie, who took eight.)
This is the scholarly tradition I was referring to in my book Outliers, when I wrote about the ‘ten-thousand-hour rule.’ No one succeeds at a high level without innate talent, I wrote: ‘achievement is talent plus preparation.’ But the ten-thousand-hour research reminds us that ‘the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.’ In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. Nobody walks into an operating room, straight out of a surgical rotation, and does world-class neurosurgery. And second—and more crucially for the theme of Outliers—the amount of practice necessary for exceptional performance is so extensive that people who end up on top need help. They invariably have access to lucky breaks or privileges or conditions that make all those years of practice possible. As examples, I focused on the countless hours the Beatles spent playing strip clubs in Hamburg and the privileged, early access Bill Gates and Bill Joy got to computers in the nineteen-seventies. ‘He has talent by the truckload,’ I wrote of Joy. ‘But that’s not the only consideration. It never is.’ ”
I bring this issue up in the interest of becoming a winning writer. An agent friend of mine once said, after I told him that I was revising my novel for a fourth time, “That’s good. Very good. The most common problem I see is writers letting go of their work too soon. Work on it until you are satisfied.”
In the interest of the craft of writing, a good question to ask yourself is: Are you ready to log those 10,000 hours? How will you do it? Do you like to write in long spurts, working an idea until exhaustion? Or do you prefer to work an hour, or two or four, every day?
What’s the trick?
I’ve read countless articles about how many writers trick themselves into writing. Why? Because the idea of writing for three to five hours a day is intimidating. That the writers don’t have the confidence that the words will be there. That, as Joan Didion insists, they don’t trust the process. There’s a reason that “writer’s block” is a topic of endless discussion among students and professionals in the writing world.
Tricks are fine. Whatever gets you to the page.
One trick writers employ is a timer. They set a timer for ten, fifteen or twenty minutes. The rationale is that they can certainly write for twenty minutes! Then, when the timer buzzes, if the work is flowing, off they go!
Recently, the writer Janet Malcolm published a book titled Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Writers and Artists. Her fascinating and lengthy essay on the infamous Bloomsbury group gives us the backstory on how a disparate group of intellectuals and artists became ubiquitous in the literary world. Have you ever wondered how an author as experimental, as language-driven and as dreamy as Virginia Woolf became embedded into every college English curriculum? How Bloomsbury captured the imagination of virtually every aspiring author?
“Every day for five to six days a week, they went to their rooms after breakfast. They wrote from 9:30 a.m. until lunchtime at 1:00 p.m. Three and a half hours per day, five to six days per week, 330 days a year. That is why their output was prodigious—novels, memoirs, essays, a prodigious output. In the afternoons and evenings, they walked, they read, they had long discussions,” Malcolm writes.
Not every writer has the luxury of time, or the confidence to arrange their lives as the Bloomsbury group did. But what about using a timer to accomplish a minimum of twenty minutes or even an hour per day? Don’t forget: hours add up.
Do the math: You write 1,000 words in an hour, that’s four pages. Four pages over a month (twenty days) equals eighty pages. Eighty pages over three months equals 240 pages. Congratulations! You just wrote the first draft of your next book!
If you were to research the backstory of now-famous writers, you would learn that a significant percentage wrote their first books on stolen time, in short spurts, on weekends. Toni Morrison wrote in taxicabs while she was working as an editor. Christopher Gortner, author of eight novels, wrote his first three while he was working full-time.
What Are You Afraid Of? A Frank Discussion of Writer’s Block and Fear
The fear of writing is real. For many, the idea of a blank page is one of, if not the most, terrifying task. Given any other task—mopping the floor, running a load of laundry, cooking, cleaning the cat box, walking the dog—anything is more appealing than facing that page.
No matter that once the body is in the chair, the words, most of the time, will begin to flow. Still, the fear is, “What if they don’t?”
Fear is powerful. We avoid fear in all sorts of ways. We fear planes; we don’t buy a ticket. We fear meeting new people; we don’t go out to events where we don’t know anyone. Our subconscious avoids fear as a survival tool!
Avoiding fear, or any other uncomfortable situation, is called staying in your “comfort zone.” Choosing to write will certainly take you out of your comfort zone.
So, before you become a winning writer, you will have to make peace with fear. I’m not a psychologist, but my colleague Renate Stendhal is. We’ll hear from her later in our chapter on “Confidence.”
Anne Lamott wrote: “I used to not be able to write if there was a dirty dish in the sink. Now I can write if there is a dead body!”
Again, your writing is a practice. Do you work in a rush or methodically?
Joan Didion worked every day, to much success. So did the Bloomsbury group. Many writers believe in a daily writing practice like the pope believes in Jesus.
But how about this for an idea? A “crash”?
Nobel Prize-winning British writer Kazuo Ishiguro wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks. He writes: “Many people work long hours. When it comes to the writing of novels, however, the consensus seems to be that after four hours or so of continuous writing, diminishing returns set in. I’d always more or less gone along with this view, but as the summer of 1987 approached I became convinced that a drastic approach was needed. Lorna, my wife, agreed…. So Lorna and I came up with a plan. I would, for a four-week period, ruthlessly clear my diary and go on what we mysteriously called a “crash.” During the crash, I would do nothing but write from 9:00 a.m. through 10:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday. I’d get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone. No one would come to the house. Lorna, despite her busy schedule, would for this period do my share of the cooking and housework. In this way, so we hoped, I’d not only complete more work quantitatively, but reach a mental state