Mastery of Writing Takes a Lot More than 10,000 Hours

I’d throw hands with Malcolm Gladwell if I saw him on the street

Malcolm Gladwell is the guy who said that it takes at least 10,000 hours to master something. That’s about three and a half years of eight-hour days, including weekends and holidays because any math more complicated than that is beyond me. Listen, I’m a writer, I don’t do numbers.

I’ve been attempting to write novels since I was seven or eight years old. I’ve been writing short stories since even before that. I’m pretty sure I’ve surpassed my 10k hours… So what the hell? Respectfully.

It’s not that I think I’m bad at writing by any means. It’s just that I would laugh in the face of anyone who tried to call me a master. Especially if it was Malcolm.

Something I learned in film school is that just putting words down onto a page—while a great place to start, and perhaps the only place to start—isn’t quite enough in the long run. I think you need 10,000 hours of stringing together sentences, 10,000 hours of theory, and 20,000 hours combined of giving and receiving feedback.

Sometimes it feels that I didn’t really start my 10,000 hours until I learned how to create characters and plot in film school and actually had a shot at finishing ALU. I mean, fair enough, I knew how to string sentences together by then, but I don’t think I could have finished ALU without advancing my 10K hours of theory. I don’t think I could have polished it myself without getting professionally edited (feedback). And the combination of those two things made me better at then, stringing together sentences.

So maybe to finally master writing, you need 40k hours in several different things, and you need to somehow not give up by then. And there’s a lot of reasons to want to give up, because in most other skills, Mr. Gladwell would say that 40K hours is more than enough. Like, you could master four things by then.

It’s hard, too, to really nail down what mastery of writing looks like except that to me, it has a sort of magic to it. I would name Donna Tartt, Margaret Atwood, maybe Stephen King (though I kind of have beef with him too), as well-known masters of writing in their genre. There’s something living and breathing about their works—they command the English language, rather than the other way around. That’s mastery.

I’m not at a Donna Tartt level—that’s a pretty high level to aspire to (I still write things like “pretty high”), but if we started my 40K hours from the moment I started working on what would become the final version of ALU—I at least have a solid foundation. Plus, I have 10K hours of “wanting to but not giving up through pure spite alone," which is basically the 'required reading' of writing mastery, so there's that.