Beyond 10,000 Hours: How Writers Really Get Better

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Hello, friends, and welcome back to Writing While Distracted.
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I'm Brenda Murphy, your NeuroSpicy writing coach.
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I'm glad you've joined me today, where we're going to talk about writers and
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the 10,000-hour concept of mastery. So stay tuned.
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If you're not familiar with the 10,000-hour concept or theory,
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if you're not familiar with the 10,000-hour concept of mastery,
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The idea came from a 1993 study conducted by Anders Ericsson and his team.
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And then it was promoted by Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling book, Outliers,
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that if you practiced something for 10,000 hours on average,
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you would become a master in whatever that was, whatever that craft was,
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or whatever that skill set was.
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The problem is, is that like a lot of things that are simply repeated without
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an understanding of what they are,
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it has led to a lot of frustration because people believe that if they just
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put in the time, they'll get better.
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And that is the myth of 10,000 hours. 10,000 hours of subpar practice is not
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going to get you anywhere.
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10,000 hours of just putting in the hours isn't going to improve anything.
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So that is the myth of 10,000 hours, that you can just do 10,000 hours of something
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and that you'll get better.
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The reality is, without focused practice, you won't get any better.
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There are three keys to improving using the 10,000-hour theory,
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and this is the part that most people leave out when they talk about it.
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So for writers, how does that apply?
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There are three parts to improving any skill.
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First, you need a goal.
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A goal is something you can aim for and measure your progress against.
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Second, you need deliberate practice.
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And that means working on the stuff that doesn't come easy, working on the stuff
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that's challenging, working on the things that you may not be naturally good
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at or particularly talented in.
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Talent is often a very confused expression because, oh, they're so talented.
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That means that for the same amount of time they put in, they will make more progress than you.
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If you have less talent, you're going to have to work harder to get where someone
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else might get in an hour.
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It might take you five hours or 10 hours or 100 hours to achieve the same level of skill.
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But in any craft, any skill, deliberate practice will make you better.
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What do I mean by deliberate practice. I mean, practice that is guided by feedback.
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That means you can't always see the things that you're not good at.
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So you need someone else to help you with that.
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Depending on what kind of feedback you need, it can come from any number of sources.
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For writers, this could be feedback from your beta readers.
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This could be feedback from your alpha readers. This could be feedback from
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editors. It could be feedback that you get in the form of constructive reviews,
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or if it's something you notice pops up all the time in a review.
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All of this came about, this idea for doing this podcast came about because
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I've had so many conversations with writers who are very frustrated,
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and they tell me, I've been writing for years, but I'm not making any progress.
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And when I dig a little deeper and I ask them what they mean by,
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what do they mean by progress?
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They usually tell me something like they want to get an agent or a traditional
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publishing deal or hit a bestseller list.
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And the problem with those goals are that they're beyond your control.
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You can't control what an agent wants or whether readers buy your book.
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You can't control your ability to hit a bestseller list.
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That is made up of so many different things. And if you dig a little deep into
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what constitutes what books get on bestseller list,
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it will probably become very clear to you that it is not about how well a book is written.
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So those aren't goals that you
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can really measure your progress against because you can't control them.
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Goals have to be something that you yourself can control.
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So what can you control? You can control your craft.
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You can decide to work on something that maybe you're not so good at.
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Maybe you work on pacing or dialogue or character development or world building.
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Those areas will have a direct payoff on the quality of your writing.
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For example, when I first started writing, my biggest struggle was structure.
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And I'm sure there's some people out there that would argue I still struggle
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with it, but I'm much better than what I used to be.
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My brain runs about a thousand miles an hour in a thousand different directions.
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It is how I am wired. It is a function of my ADHD.
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It is how a lot of people who are neurodivergent think. It's how our brains work.
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We don't necessarily work in a linear fashion.
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Trying to corral all of those ideas into a coherent story was overwhelming and frustrating.
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And my discovery of mind mapping and learning about mind mapping came about,
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actually, because I was taking a class on how to teach children with special needs.
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My undergraduate degree is in education, and that was a class that I had to take.
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And I'm so grateful that I did because I learned so many ways to help teach
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myself and also help teach other people that may struggle with a number of different
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things as far as not learning like everybody else.
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But the glorious thing that I learned in that class was all about mind mapping.
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I'd never heard of it. And if you've never heard of it, I highly recommend it.
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And I will link a blog post, an extensive blog post that I did on mind mapping
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and how you can use it to guide your writing below in the podcast notes.
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So if you want to do a deeper dive in that, you can.
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But essentially what you do is you get a piece of paper and you dump out all
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of those ideas that you have about your story on a piece of paper in no particular order or fashion.
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You then you go back and draw lines between the ideas.
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And using those lines and connections, you then can create sort of a loosey-goosey outline.
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Some people can create a very structured outline. I don't really write from an outline.
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I write from a scene list because I don't always have the details nailed down in my story.
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I make them up as I go along because I'm somewhere between a plotter and a pantser.
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And that's just how I create. It may work for you, it may not.
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But again, I'll link that post below so you can do a little deeper dive in it.
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That learning tool was my first taste of deliberate practice as a writer.
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I wasn't just writing my drafts. I was focusing on the structure and studying,
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reading so many stories, trying to figure out how they worked.
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Getting feedback on my writing. I had beta readers.
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I had other writers that were further along the writing path than I am.
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And I am ever grateful for those people who agreed to read my early work and
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help me understand where I could make my writing stronger and where my structure
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fell apart and where it took cliff dives.
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And by tearing my drafts apart and putting them back together again,
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over time, my books got stronger.
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And when I go back and read my early books, which I have to do sometimes when
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I'm writing another book in a series, I can see how I've improved. And that makes me happy.
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And it'll make you happy, too, if you do this deliver practice.
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When I finally felt like I understood structure, I moved on to character development.
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I wanted to write characters that I have read, the kind of characters that you
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just couldn't wait to read more about, the kind of characters that make you
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turn the page because you want to see what those people are doing next.
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I studied with teachers I admired. I read everything I could and applied it
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to my next book, which was a double six.
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And I wrote that during NaNoWriMo when it was a thing before it collapsed into
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the horrific mess that occurred and if you know you know and if you don't know
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if you look it up it'll really bother you so maybe don't do that.
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Double Six won the Goldie in 2020 for erotica and what I loved about that is
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that I felt like that practice had deliberately affected the quality of that book.
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Now, again, I can't control whether a book wins an award, but I can control
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the quality of a book that I submit for an award.
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So again, deliberate practice. And it can pay off.
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And each book going forward, I've chosen different things to focus on when I
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feel like I've accomplished something. And that is what I want you to take away from this.
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You can't control external success. You can't control agents,
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publishers, or sales, but you can control how you approach your writing practice.
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Writing is a craft, and crafts can be learned and improved and refined.
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For neurodivergent, neuro-spicy folks out there, this is something that if you've
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got hyper-focus, you have a leg up on everybody.
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If you're one of those people that becomes obsessive, what I'm asking you to
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do is to become obsessive about improving or hyper-focused on improving your craft.
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And that's how you accomplish deliberate practice. And that's how you improve.
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So if you're feeling stuck in your writing, you feel like you just can't get
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anything going, or you're just not happy with the quality of it,
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pick one thing to focus on.
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Maybe it's dialogue or character development or pacing.
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Study that thing. Read books by people that you admire.
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Read books by people whose writing you want to emulate, not copy,
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but steal like an artist, emulate that.
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Bring those concepts in. How do they make their characters so unforgettable?
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How do they make their settings come alive? How do they make it so you stay
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up all dang night reading a darn book because you can't bear to close it because you have to know?
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What do they do? How do they build a book so that you cannot close the cover?
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You stay up all night reading it because you have to find out how the story ends.
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Those are the books you want to read. Those are the things you want to really
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take apart to figure out how they did it.
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It's almost like magic tricks that aren't so magic once you understand how something is done.
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And that's the beautiful part about writing.
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You can find out how something is done.
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You may not be able to do it as well as they ever do it, but you can improve.
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And that's what I want you to hold on to. You can improve.
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So if you're feeling stuck, pick that one thing, apply what you learn to your next project.
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So pick the one thing, study it, practice it, and get feedback on that thing.
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Ask specific questions about the thing. If you're working on pacing,
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ask your beta readers, could you please pay attention to pacing?
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Could I improve it? What do you think?
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If you're working with an editor, same thing.
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Ask deliberate questions to get the feedback that you need for deliberate practice.
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So applying what you learn to your next project or ongoing project is how you get better.
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Not by logging 10,000 random hours, but by being deliberate about how you use your time.
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And time for all of us is tight.
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So don't waste it doing the same thing over and over and over again and wondering
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why you're not improving.
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And please don't sell yourself short, especially if you're neurodivergent,
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especially if you had struggled in school.
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I know that in your head, you have a lot of discouraging voices that tell you
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all the time, you're never going to be good enough, you're never going to get better.
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All of the ugly things that inner critic says to you, because we faced a lot of that in school.
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Some of us were told we were lazy. Some of us were told we were stupid.
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Some of us were told we would never amount to anything. And you know what?
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Those people were wrong, because you can absolutely improve. Ignore those voices.
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Ignore the discouraging voices that you may hear from people in your life.
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You have stories worth telling. You can improve.
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And the only way to get better at writing is to write.
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And I've said this before, not think about it all the time, not plan about it
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all the time, but to actually write.
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Because you can talk all day about it. You can think all day about it.
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You can plan all day about it. But until you actually apply your butt to the
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seat of a chair and put words into your computer or onto a piece of paper or
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dictate them into a writing program,
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nothing is going to change.
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So what do I want you to do with all of this information? I want you to pick
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one thing. I want you to set a goal for that.
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For improvement in that one thing. And that may feel nebulous because believe
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me, it's not as hardcore as I'm going to write a thousand words a day or I'm
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going to finish this draft by the end of November.
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But you can figure out how to set goals for nebulous concepts.
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And that's what I'm asking you to do. Set a goal.
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Improve structure of my books. You know, have less comments about structure.
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Have a book that actually has an ending that makes sense instead of a cliff
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dive into an abyss of, I don't know what the heck happened with these characters.
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You can set those goals. Set the goal, do your deliberate practice,
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and then get your feedback. And keep working.
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You get to define what success looks like for you.
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And if that success means that you now have a character that people want to
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get t-shirts of, or they write fan letters to, or any of the other hundred things,
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like maybe people write you letters and say, please write this character in another book.
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That's success. That can be success for you. Or maybe you're just happy with that character.
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And I'm all about choosing success markers that you are in control of achieving,
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getting a draft finished, writing those 1,000 words, doing that 10,000 hours of practice.
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You are in control of those measures and markers of success.
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I hope you take encouragement from today's podcast to make a plan,
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do the work, and get your story out there. Work on it.
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People need your words. People need your story. Until next time, take care.
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Thanks for spending time with me today. If this episode has helped you,
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or if you'd like to share what you're working on improving right now,
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drop me a comment or send me a message. I'd love to hear from you.
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If you have any ideas about future podcasts, things you'd like me to take a
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little deeper dive into, please drop those in the comments below too.
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And as always, stay tuned, stay inspired, and keep writing, friends.