Learning The Craft of Writing
One of our writing colleagues, Joe Finder, wrote an exceptionally thoughtful post on the power of learning to write through reading and study of books we enjoy. Books to be influenced by, Joe reminds us, are those we can rely upon for education as well as inspiration.
Stephen King famously said in his memoir, On Writing, one needed only two habits to develop writing skills: read a lot and write a lot.
With the utmost respect to Mr. King, I would qualify his point by suggesting that what you read and what you write also matters, as does the quantity of both.
Malcolm Gladwell recently postulated “The 10,000 Hour Rule” — that one needs 10,000 hours of practice to become sufficiently proficient at one’s desired skills before performing them expertly. That sounds about right to me. And I’m guessing Mr. King would agree.
Don’t worry that putting in your 10,000 hours will hold you back. Late bloomers, it seems, are more common than widely publicized youthful successes. Gladwell reminds us that forty-two percent of David Frost’s anthologized poems were written after the age of fifty; Alfred Hitchcock made seven of his best films between the ages of fifty-four and sixty-seven; Mark Twain published “Huckleberry Finn” at forty-nine; and Daniel Defoe wrote “Robinson Crusoe” at fifty-eight.
Once the craft is learned, today’s writers continue to produce quality prose for decades, many writing well into their 70s and 80s, and still productive at the time of death, such as Saul Bellow who died at 89, John Ashbery at 81, and John Updike at 76. Those still writing include Philip Roth (76), Robert B. Parker, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (82).
The good news is that you’ve already devoted quite a few of your 10,000 hours to learning the craft of writing. You might already be there. The more interesting news is that writing is a skill that can always be improved. The joy of learning is only one of the joys of writing.
