Ten thousand hours

This week I've been reading life coach Martha Beck's book 'Finding your way in a wild new world'.  I was drawn to the book because of the stories of wildlife in Africa, but I also like Martha's mind-expanding, and quite challenging, way of seeing the world.

The book has a section on 'Tracking your true nature.'  In it, she reminds us of the German researchers who studied music students to try and determine what made some merely good and others geniuses. Surprisingly, it didn't turn out to be anything to do with brain structure.  It was down to good hard work.  To be a world-class musician, you had to practice for about ten thousand hours.

That sent me off to calculate how many hours I've devoted to the craft of writing.  The answer was staggering.  During the 24 years of my full-time employment I averaged two hours' writing a day over 360 days a year.  That comes to a total of 17,280 hours.  A decade ago when my parents died I walked out of my day job and became a full time writer.  Now I average around five hours' work on writing a day.  Calculating this over 360 days a year, in the last decade I've put in 18,000 hours of  writing practice.  When I added those up and got a figure of 35,280 hours my jaw dropped.  I've done enough practice to take me to the 'genius' level three times over!

And yet, for all of that, I still haven't sold a single story. This where the 'genius' runs up against the pure numbers of the publishing business.  We don't have the luxury of being nurtured by editors and our talent honed.  Those days are long gone, but it's time we returned to them.  I think editors and finance people at publishers should do at least 100 hours of writing practice each year as part of their job requirements.  Their appraisals should include an assessment of the work they've done.  Editors say they know a good story when they see one, but I'm not convinced that can be done without some immersion into the craft of writing.

As Martha Beck says, finding our real talents and following them are what lead us to career gold in the end.  Editors nurturing those writers who have put in their ten thousand hours, found their own voices, and know what they want to say, could revitalise publishing.  If publishers returned their primary focus to the excellence of the writing they published rather than financial projections, chances are their bottom lines would improve.  Find the genius talent, publish it, and just maybe that writer will save your company.