Truly Breathtaking

A collection of snippets from what I'm currently reading that has taken my breath away.

Oct, Nov, Dec 2012

Writing for Ten Thousand Hours

Malcolm Gladwell has gotten a lot of criticism about his book The Outliers, but one idea that has gone positively viral and straight into our cultural consciousness is his idea of ten thousand hours.  The basic idea is that to be expert at anything, we first have to spend ten thousand hours doing it.

While I actually think some of the other theses of Gladwell's book--that our success is based on a lot of factors that have nothing to do with us, like cultural values, national laws, a familial legacy, and access to the kind of intense, demanding feedback that makes each one of those ten thousand hours a huge learning experience--have more relevance to his overall point about outliers, those ideas have a hard time finding fecund soil in our society.  People want to believe they are the only important factor in their success.  They farm out the blame for their failure to every manner of external factor, from but want to be the sole engineers of how awesome they are when anything goes right.

To be honest, we'd all do a lot better in life if we did exactly the opposite--took responsibilities for our failings and failures, and acknowledged everything around us (besides our sheer unadulterated awesomeness) that contributed to our successes.  Writers in particular are going to find a whole lot of "no one gives a shit" when they start tallying up their excuses for failure.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that no one can ever be proud of how hard they've worked, but most writers who make it have a list as long as their arms of things outside of themselves they need to thank--from supportive spouses to trust funds to a friend who was getting rid of their old laptop right when they needed one.  Keeping all those people in one's thoughts if you achieve something significant is just good humility.

Writers are already creatures of untamed ego.  If they don't learn to cultivate humility, they start being central in space opera movie scenes where old men named Ben (who live out beyond the dune sea) with white beards and burlap robes slowly look towards the "small moon" where that short-ranged fighter is headed and say: "That's not a moon.  It's a writers ego."

This is just before spaghetification occurs to the whole lot of them.  (Hopefully my astronomy peeps aren't the only ones who get this awesome joke about the size of a writer's ego.)

Plus if you try to take all the credit for your success and claim you just wanted it enough and worked hard enough, enraged wannabes who are working just as hard as you but without all the benefits are likely to attack you, fury glinting in their wild eyes as they froth at the mouth and beat you into a bloodied pulp with their moleskin journals.

But let's talk about the 10,000 hours, since that is the idea that's become a viral meme, and an idea that really becomes useful when thinking about writing.

Gladwell is usually misquoted as saying that it requires ten thousand hours to be merely "great" at something, but he actually says it takes that long for extraordinary people to become paragons.  A "phenom," which is the actual word he uses, is usually a young person who is outstanding.  Gladwell was talking about the best of the best.  The people in a field who even make the other experts in the field look like amateurs.  Gladwell would say that Shakespeare and Faulkner took 10,000 hours to hit their stride.  What Gladwell wasn't offering is a recipe for average people to reach success.  Us normal people with our normal skill sets aren't going to work for 10,000 hours and be phenoms.  We just aren't outliery enough.

But you know what?  Fuck Gladwell.  Fuck him right in the ear.

Ten thousand hours has entered our cultural consciousness because it turns out that it IS a pretty good amount of time for someone to be really, really good at something.  Also, it's a nice, round number.  We love nice, round numbers.  But mostly it just seems to be on to something.  When someone's written that much, you can just tell.  You can detect a quality in their writing that someone without that practice lacks.  They can transform ideas into words with greater ease.

Let me break 10,000 hours down for you because it's probably longer than you think.  At 2 hours a day, every single day--including weekends and holidays you would finish your ten thousand hours at just over thirteen and a half years.  This is probably why, when it comes to expository writing, a graduate of college is generally considered to have good written communication skills.  After sixteen years of school, they have probably just reached their 10,000 hours.

Sixteen years of school.

Unfortunately, while there is some overlap between expository writing and creative writing, almost any writer who can get an A on a paper by handing in a first draft knows all too well that they are different skill sets.  I have a lot of friends who are very skilled writers at tech or freelance writing who can attest to the fact that creative writing is a whole different beast.

For most subjects we didn't start in the first grade, 10,000 is usually just about being wrapped up at the conclusion of a PhD program.  Ten thousand hours isn't fucking around.

Here's another way to think of this.  Most people are pretty good at their jobs.  This is because if they have a regular job, they're probably doing it somewhere around eight hours a day.  Let's assume our person is actually working eight hours a day, five days a week and not calling in "sick" several times a year or seriously slacking off after lunch.  They'll hit their 10,000 hours at a little under five years.  And, in fact, when I was in management, over and over I read the figure that with complex skill set jobs (like management) it would take about five years for someone to really get the hang of what they were doing and be good material for promotions.   That means that even if you do something like it's a 40 hour a week job, you're still looking at 5 years.

Around three hours a day, with an occasional break, you'll reach your ten thousand hours in about ten years.  Ten years.  Ten YEARS!  Tenyears.  TEN YEARS! (Okay play that clip below if you're not getting this.  Not everyone insta-groks John Cusack movie references as well as me.)

If you can only give the art (to which poetic dedication is pronounced regularly) a single hour a day....you will achieve your 10,000 hours in a little over twenty-seven years.

Two or three hours a day is where most people who are dedicated to some kind of art tend to land.  People who want to be great musicians practice on their instrument for two or three hours a day long before they join their city's philharmonic.  Visual artists often sketch and work constantly for years before they begin to be recognized as having talent and skill.  Ten years of hard work and resiliency for hours each day before the product will really reach a level that has apparent, recognizable ability.  And if ten years seems like a long time, let me remind you that three hours a day isn't chump change either.  Other than sleep and work, most Americans only spend that much time watching TV (or with the new generation this is often taken up by video games, net surfing, and other computer activities).  Most would-be writers can't even begin to conceive of writing for two or three hours every day, and many will catalog quite vociferously their excuses for not doing so.  Some even balk at writing thirty minutes a day.  Thirty minutes a day would get you to your ten thousand hours in 54 years.  At that point you'd probably break your hip when you cry out "Woo Hoo!"  (Unless you started your regimen at like four years old or something.)

When we place the idea of being a good writer into the context of ten thousand hours we can actually begin to codify what we mean when we say that it really takes a lot of work.  That's the reason I like this idea so much and come back to it so often.  It may not be a recipe, but it merits out more often than it doesn't  (that is to say, almost every single time--and every time I've ever checked...ever)  and it's hard to do any art for 10,000 hours and not be much, much better at it.

Ten thousand hours isn't about publication and it certainly isn't about success.  Other factors play large roles in either of those.  I know a lot of writers who are watching 10k hours fading away in their rear view mirror who are still struggling to get their first short story picked up by a magazine.  But something they all have in common is that they are good writers.  Their writing is on another level, and I can always instantly tell when I am reading the writing of one of my classmates or someone in a writing group who has been at it for years.  (I have never been wrong.)  Ten thousand hours is also not a switch where one simply crosses the threshold and their writing transforms.  But despite how imperfect and misquoted and unreliable and non dichotomous the whole idea of 10,000 hours can be, it is uncanny how well it can be a predictor for quality.

But then again...if you think about how much practice that is and how much dedication it represents...maybe it isn't that uncanny at all.

Writers on Writers (Thursday's Three)

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.
Samuel Johnson

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector.  This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
Ernest Hemingway

Loafing is the most productive part of a writer's life.
James Norman Hall

New Dangers of the Industry

In lieu of content that I'm too sick to write, I will instead a link to a very interesting article about Rosie Fiore, a writer who blogs an expose about someone who very blatantly steals electronic books.

It is an exciting time in the publishing industry.  Electronic media means one need not go through gatekeepers to be published, or even to make a living (in some cases, a good living) by writing.  But it also introduces new dangers and pitfalls--namely the ubiquity of piracy.  People think because it's easy to download music, books, movies, whatever that there isn't anything wrong with it.  They go to convoluted lengths to convince themselves they're only stealing from huge nameless corporations or that it's really not theft.  They try to justify their theft by imagining they are taking nothing from anyone who would miss it.

But they do.  And they need to be called out.

They are stealing from artists.  It is really, truly theft.  It is no different than shoplifting a book.

Dear Stinkle01, you're a thief.

I also just want it to go viral want an asshole thief this Stinkle01 guy is.

Sick Writer is Sick

The good news is, it seems like my cat, Ben, is feeling quite a bit better.  The bad news is, now it looks like I'm sick.  I picked up a pretty bad cold last night.

Lt. Lambaste and SciGuy should be able to run this without me holding their hand, but I haven't heard anything from them.

I'm not so sick I can't put up some quotes, so I should be able to take over tomorrow.  

Elements of Craft

26 letters and 14 pieces of punctuation form libraries of masterpieces.  The only trick is the ordering.

One of the true paradoxes of art is that any art form is a holistic composite of many elements that are woven together.  In fact, a measure of good art is an almost invisible and seamless cooperation between those elements to all work towards the same impact.  The gestalt of the art transcends the measure of its discrete elements by leaps and bounds.  However, art can rarely be either richly understood or taught without breaking those elements down to examine them with some scrutiny, creating a false sense of boundary between them.  Dissecting art into its elements is like putting pins through individual butterfly species to examine them.  You have to do it to understand them, but it is nothing compared to the majesty of standing in a field while myriads of monarchs, satyrs, and metalmarks explode as a gush of color into the Arkansas sky around you.

When we examine fiction with the intent of improving our own craft, it becomes essential for us to look at the discrete parts as well as how they are all working together.  These elements are similar to literary analysis, but often use an even higher "magnification."

You have 26 letters and 14 pieces of punctuation.  With those forty symbols, rearranged, we can create anything from The Bell Jar to Sonnet 23 to Animal Farm.  So here is where I will do my best to explain the the elements that writers use, consciously or not, as the threads they weave into their craft.

Concrete Imagery
Significant Detail
Filter your Filtering
Prose Rhythm
The Punctum (easier to show than explain) Ex 1, Ex 2 (Say Something)
Tone
Narrative Distance

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Miscellaneous Monday

Due to a very sick cat (Benjamin J Cat, actually, who is having trouble keeping anything down), a peep who needs a pick up from the airport, and a weekend made of sleep fail so epic that Gilgamesh and Ulysses would do the proud sensei/sifu nod to see it, today's "entry" is going to be some low key maintenance stuff all over the sight that I've been meaning to do.

Vera clearly needs to be added to the Cast and Crew.  She's been with me for a fortnight now, she's taking over an increasingly large share of the writing burden from my desktop, and it's time we acknowledged her.  There are a couple of other characters I need to add as well.

I've been meaning to update several links in the Reliquary but just haven't gotten around to it.

I have a few more "stubs" to put up.  (Apologies to people with RSS feeds if doing so spams you a little.)  My reliquary links all go back to old entries that I then edit with links to articles.  Sometimes I can cannibalize  and edit old filler entries that no one really read anyway, but there are only so many of those.

It's time to finally get started on the Reliquary entry for "Simply Breathtaking" don't you think?

General fiddling with the knobs.  I've got what I needed from the poll, so I'm going to take that down and put up another.

I may post later with an update to the glossary depending on how everything else shakes out.