The Kyle Phoenix Blog: Do you think the Ericcson/Gladwell Outliers 10k hour rule applies to writers?

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Do you think the Ericcson/Gladwell Outliers 10k hour rule applies to writers?

Kyle Phoenix, At 40,000 plus hours, 2018

My students and I had a lively debate about whether 10,000 hours of work on ones writing would garner skill and possible mastery. I fell into the yes camp but I did add it requires deliberate practice, one must write across the spectrum to get a feel in various areas ---fictions genres, journalism-magazine, newspaper and interviews, playwrighting/screenwriting, poetry, essays, technical and business then you'll both get a sense of your interest and stretch.

I personally find poetry and playwrighting the most difficult though I actually won several poetry prizes and have done lots of readings, even getting paid.

But I pointed out I have had about six mentors from high school, college, grad school just focused on my work and I've bombed plenty of times. Their aid was instrumental in helping me to develop.

We then counted the amount of times published anywhere because it meant your work had stood on its own and garnered attention.

There was a lot of calculations going on, lifespan, time asleep, time at a job, time not writing. We settled on a fourth of 1/4 of one's lifespan as a general rule of time if you were seriously committed to your art. Then it got ugly, we looked several of my creative writing classmates to see if they'd continued the writing output I saw from classes with them. We guesstimated 400 and tracked down 4 who'd stuck with it and graduated to social media in notation or further writing. Blogs counted because you could republish them offline.

I had to go find old classmates work in storage and then look them up, discreetly because we wanted to see who'd stuck with it and advanced, progressed.

Still 4.

Lots of people went into careers sure. Seemed Facebook happy but only a handful still were writers. It made us think that any art is both compulsion and commitment but that if you could get to a certain amount of time, it became natural habitual.

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