Just like playing a sport or a musical instrument, writing is a craft that must be practiced.
You may have heard that you have to write a million words before you get good. I don’t know who first said that; the principle has been attributed to Ray Bradbury, Jerry Pournelle, David Eddings, and others. But writing is art and cannot be reduced to mathematical formulas.
Likewise the so-called ten thousand hour rule, which posits that if you put in ten thousand hours of practice you can become an expert at a thing.
Practicing anything without guidance just teaches you to do it the same way. It does no good to write a million words in ten thousand hours if you make the same mistakes over and over.
The ten thousand hour rule comes from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success, which summarizes and misinterprets research by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, psychologists who studied music students at an elite school and found that on average the students had put in about ten thousand hours of concentrated practice to gain admission to that school. It is disingenuous to extrapolate from one study of musicians a principle that would apply to different fields. Also, it’s important to note this was an average. Some of the students achieved mastery with less practice, some took more. And of course, some students who had put in just as much practice may not have been admitted to the program because there were a limited number of slots.
What Ericsson and Pool actually found is that regardless of the field of endeavor, what is required to succeed is deliberate practice, which they define this way:
“…constantly pushing oneself beyond one’s comfort zone, following training activities designed by an expert to develop specific abilities, and using feedback to identify weaknesses and work on them.”— Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise.*
What we learn from Ericsson and Pool is not that a certain number of hours spent writing or words written will develop our expertise, but rather that mastering the craft requires those three elements of deliberate practice.
Push beyond your comfort zone. Write on a topic that makes you uncomfortable. Play the devil’s advocate. Write a genre that’s not familiar to you. If you never write poetry, write poetry. If you normally write poetry, write prose. If you normally write novels, write flash fiction. And vice versa.
Follow training activities. I recommend Writing Tools* by Roy Peter Clark, which includes exercises in each chapter, and the Writing Excuses podcast, which includes an assignment at the end of each episode.
Use feedback. Join a good critique group. Writers need critique partners. Whether your critique partners provide big-picture feedback on character and plot or granular corrections like finding spelling and grammar errors, they will help you improve your craft because they will see things in your work that you don’t see because you’re too close to it. And you can do the same for them.
How to find a critique group:
- Search for “writers critique groups” with the name of your city.
- Look in Meetup.com.
- Check bookstores, especially those with public posting boards.
- Ask at your local library. Sometimes libraries host writing groups, and even if they don’t, they are often connected to local writing communities and can help you find one.
- Connect with other writers at conferences.
- Seek out an organization specific to your genre and see if they host online critique groups.
Some people are reluctant to join a critique group because they’ve had a bad experience. Try again. It’s worth it. Another good reason for writers to join critique groups is that too many of us (yes, I’m including myself!) have written entire novels without getting any feedback. When we do that, any faults in our craft affect the entire manuscript. If your critique partners point out a faulty technique when they critique your first chapter, you can improve that technique as you write the future chapters. So I recommend joining a critique group early on in your writing process, rather than waiting until you’ve finished your manuscript.
* — Amazon affiliate links