Like many things in this life, writing is a journey. Very few of us knock a home run out of the park the first time you sit down to write. Let’s face it, if it were that easy to do it would be boring. The challenge lies in mastering your craft and plugging away at it until you are actually good at. Once you’re good at it the challenge becomes repeating that success.
If you scratch the surface of most people that are called over-night successes, what you would really find is someone (obviously with some talent) who has paid their dues put their time in and plugged away at their craft. They say that it takes in the neighbourhood of a million words that need to flow from your brain to your fingertips in writing before you get any good at it. There was a book out a few years ago called Outliers – The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell which proposed that in addition to luck and other environmental factors that when they looked at successful people across all categories they found that it took around 10,000 hours of ‘practice’ before you master something. I’ll save you the math – that’s the equivalent of 20 hours of work a week for almost 10 years. From Bill Gates to the Beatles, they found that those driven and talented people didn’t really hit their stride until they had those 10,000 hours under their belt.
I’ve been on a writing journey ever since I penned my first piece of fiction in elementary school on some foolscap paper, unfortunately for me I spent a lot of the first half of my life going in circles and not knowing which way to turn. It wasn’t until I was in my early 30s that I began to wake up to my writing life and make a concentrated effort to develop it, seeking out other like-minded writers along the way. I have to admit even then it was a lot of it was baby-steps, trial and error, but all in all essential steps along the path. While I have the 10 years under my belt, I am still working on the 10,000 hours and the million words. Standing here on the crest of middle-age I can look behind me and see the path that has lead me to where I am today. Looking forward I can see I still have a way to go to reach my goals.
Thanks for being a part of this journey.