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It Takes Work
Feb. 4th, 2012 07:08 pmThis article, by Fred at slacktivist, has cheered me up: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/02/02/groundhog-day-and-the-10000-hour-montage/#more-6049
Sometimes I read a book by Bujold, or Pamela Dean, or Patricia McKillip, and feel bad. I'm not as good as they are. I don't know if I'll ever be as good as they are. It's depressing.
But I haven't worked as long as they have. The post I linked above says it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery: 20 hours a week for 10 years. I missed out on a lot of years of practice because I bought into the "practicality" myth: that being a writer was an impractical goal, and therefore I should spend my time and effort on other things rather than what I wanted to do and what I was good at.
When I finally said "screw that", and started to practice writing again, it was hard. I wrote, and write, fanfiction, for practice, because it's fun, and because the most difficult part of writing, for me, is creating an original world. I've been practicing for over two years now. It's not as hard to get words down any longer, and I can see some real improvement. I'm better at "showing" and I'm more willing to cut scenes that don't work plot-wise, even if I like them. I've finally gotten some workable ideas for a world, and hopefully soon, I'm going to start work on an original novel.
And damn it, if Nicholas Sparks and Stephenie Meyer and Laurel K. Hamilton and Dan Brown can be published, so can I.
Sometimes I read a book by Bujold, or Pamela Dean, or Patricia McKillip, and feel bad. I'm not as good as they are. I don't know if I'll ever be as good as they are. It's depressing.
But I haven't worked as long as they have. The post I linked above says it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery: 20 hours a week for 10 years. I missed out on a lot of years of practice because I bought into the "practicality" myth: that being a writer was an impractical goal, and therefore I should spend my time and effort on other things rather than what I wanted to do and what I was good at.
When I finally said "screw that", and started to practice writing again, it was hard. I wrote, and write, fanfiction, for practice, because it's fun, and because the most difficult part of writing, for me, is creating an original world. I've been practicing for over two years now. It's not as hard to get words down any longer, and I can see some real improvement. I'm better at "showing" and I'm more willing to cut scenes that don't work plot-wise, even if I like them. I've finally gotten some workable ideas for a world, and hopefully soon, I'm going to start work on an original novel.
And damn it, if Nicholas Sparks and Stephenie Meyer and Laurel K. Hamilton and Dan Brown can be published, so can I.
