Head Grenade Productions

Malcom Gladwell, author of both Blink and The Tipping Point, has recently released his newest work, Outliers: The Story of Success. And, due to that sort of an opening sentence, you can guess that I am currently reading, and am a strident fan of, Malcom Gladwell’s work, and his newest book as well. Like always, though, something caught my attention, different from the rest (at least so far; I still haven’t gotten to the part where they talk about plane crashes).

He offers a rule for success, the 10,000 hour rule, which states, if you look at the masters of any field of work, they all practiced a minimum of 10,000 hours to master their craft. Art, literature, music, science, mathematics, computer programming, he offers many examples. I don’t feel like going into the book and searching them out right now for other reasons, but they are there. It’s nothing special, when you think about it. Everyone seems to mention that the most important part of any occupation, whether sports or creative or academic, constant practice with whatever medium that is used is the most important. Writing is just the same. I’ve heard other ways of saying this, though I cannot remember the names of the people, such as the famous quote of some Violinist to a fan.

Fan: I would give my life to play like you.

Violinist: I did.

Practice is hard. Doesn’t matter what for, it’s hard, dirty, and oftentimes what comes out of it is pretty useless. (I should know; I read some of my poems I did for practice — boy was that a s***storm and a half) But everyone says it’s important, mainly because, it is. Maybe I don’t have the right to say that yet, but I’m fairly certain, one day, I will have the authority to say that, if only because the bile I spew forth onto clean white paper is so bad from fiction-writing-brain-cells atrophying over the years from lack of mental exercise.

I used to write a lot more than I do recently. I’ve written hundreds of pages for one or two stories, and had the energy to keep going on and on beyond them. But that was some time ago. And for all the writing and working I did, then all the way until now, I don’t think it was ten thousand hours. Maybe four thousand, which, according to the music scale which is used as the primary example, would put me at a perfect place for a middle school music teacher. Hot diggidy damn. Maybe, if I really squeezed, I could get six thousand, which is just enough to not be sucky.

I want to go back to writing again. I miss it. Every time I stop writing, and then go back, I realize more and more how important it is to me. I don’t want to write. I need to write. It’s wonderful to be able to think that sometimes, because at least some part of me then knows that it will be forced to keep writing until the day I die. If it was only a want, I need to be doubly sure to make room for it, to set aside hours to write and compose. But a need, that’s different. That will grab you by the throat in the middle of the night, while spending time with your love the day before she leaves and say “GET OFF YOUR FAT ASS, D*****T!” I know. That was last night, and it felt like a relief to just sit and write again, not just for class, but because I wanted to write a story. Barely got a page done, and it’s clear how ridiculously hard the story I’m trying to write now will be, but it’s started.

I’m going to keep writing here, if only to make sure I have to write, a little bit at least, every day. I don’t know how well that will go. I’m not a consistent, dependable person. I shirk a lot. I procrastinate more than I shirk. And I’ve left a lot of projects by the wayside and forgotten. So, should you come across this discarded blog post some five years in the future, you know what happened. But even if I should fail into nothingness, I wish you the best of luck yourselves, those of you who . . . well, those of you who do anything.