I had two questions a while back from an aspiring writer. The first one was, “I’ve got thirty-thousand words written. Should I start looking for an agent?” I hate these kinds of questions because I can’t tell them what they want to hear. So after giving them what I figured was the correct answer, the follow up question was, “Okay, so once a writer finishes the book and gets an agent, how long before they can quit their day-job.” I admit, I was a bit dumb-struck and while my brain was going “Let me break out my divination toolkit” and refusing to come up with something encouraging, I finally settled on “I have no idea.”

I still don’t have an answer (that fortune-telling kit I bought is pure bunk; don’t waste your money), but I do have some thoughts on writers, writing, and their expectations.

So here goes…

Probably like most people, I was introduced to the 10,000-hour concept via Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success. (If you haven’t read it, it’s a pretty quick read and well worth the time).

To condense it to its most basic form, the premise for the 10,000-hour rule is that it takes ten-thousand hours of work/practice to become an “expert.” The specifics of what constitutes “work” or “practice” or an “expert” seem to have inspired a bevy of criticisms since the book came out in 2008.

I ran a quick search on “ten thousand hours rule” this morning and was surprised to find the links “debunking” the concept preceded a link to the book itself. My understanding is that search results are ordered by popularity which suggests that people have been far more interested in the articles “debunking” the concept than not. To be honest, I’m not surprised. Who wants to be told they’ll have to put in 10,000 hours of work on anything.

Yet, the articles didn’t so much debunk as get into the nitty-gritty of what constituted practice, work, and expertise, as well as pointing out that there are physical traits and aptitude that will skew the results (No duh, experts, thank you. Honestly, where would we be without you.)

Ten years after the book came out, I still recall the example given, in that if you work a 40-hour week (and spend all 40 of those hours actually doing your job, rather than in meetings, travel, etc.) it would take 250 weeks, or FIVE years (50-week year) to become an expert at your job. I remember this because it paralleled my own work experience. It’s about how long it took to unlock that “expert” achievement level, and if you switched jobs you usually ended up resetting the clock or moving it back a bit.

Then Gladwell wrote about what it would take to get to the 10,000-hours in FOUR years: an extra ten hours per week (50 hours x 50 weeks x 4 years=10K). Again, these numbers stick with me because working as a salaried engineer, it seemed that we were always working 50- or 60-hour weeks. Problem was, of course, that those ten or twenty extra hours weren’t always “work” in the sense that we were doing our jobs. Mostly I’m casting the stink-eye at meetings that could have accomplished their goal by memo and various time-wasters like mandatory company training, i.e. HR meddling and getting in the way of doing work.

So, what does this have to do with writing? Well, I’m always stunned by the number of people who proclaim that they’ve been writers for N years, as if that means something. It’s a totally meaningless number, unless “year” in this case means 2000-work-hours, and each one of those work hours represents actual writing or something directly related to improving your writing skills.

It does not include research, except when you take said research and figure out how to use it in the actual writing process. It does not include marketing (which is promotion of your writing, but isn’t writing). I would argue that it includes editing, if we’re talking about editing that involves implementing editorial requests (in this case an editor NOT being a person YOU pay, but a person who your publisher pays). I would also say that includes any activity that goes towards developing your writing skillset, such as continuing education. This could include a class, a book related to the craft or skills of writing, taking a book you enjoyed and studying how that author did what he did.

Most writers are part-time writers. They have day-jobs. There’s nothing wrong with this. It does however mean that if you only have ten hours a week to devote to writing, that it’s going to take twenty years to get to that 10,000 hours. Unless you’re incredibly lucky, well-connected, or already in the industry in some other form, you’ve set yourself on a long, slow path to success.

There’s a faster track, a ten year one, if you double up to twenty hours a week, stick to it, and don’t veer off of it.

Most writers veer off the path at one point or another. Life gets in the way. Things happen.

You’ve won the lottery if you can devote forty to sixty hours a week to developing your writing skill set. You could actually achieve that four- or five-year plan as if you had a job. But it’s still a four- or five-year plan. It’s not a one-year plan. It’s not 30,000-words and “Should I start looking for an agent now?”

Hard work is key. So are realistic expectations. Becoming a writer is a marathon, not a spring, although sometimes it does feel like you’re sprinting the entire time.

This is the last installment in my review of Koontz’s, How to Write Best Selling Fiction.

It is interesting to note Koontz’s fervent advice not to allow yourself to be labeled as the writer of any specific genre, i.e. a science-fiction writer or a mystery writer. Instead, go for the label of “writer.”

Just because we start out writing in our favorite genre does not mean that we will remain there, or be successful at it. We might find greater success in a different genre. How did we start this? Wasn’t it with epistolary Gothic espionage novels set on the planet Mars in the seventeenth century? I can see his point.

Nevertheless, Koontz spends an entire chapter (the twelfth) on two genres (science fiction and mystery) and how to write them well. I will tell you up front,  I skipped the section on writing mysteries, but I’m sure it’s as packed with good information as the part on science fiction.

The main focus was on bringing aliens to life, i.e. how to write them so that they are not (a) cardboard or (b) humans with spots painted on them. It is one of the best written pieces on the subject that I have seen, and best of all, Koontz provides us with great examples. I would recommend his book for this section alone.

The takeaway, for creating aliens as well as alien milieus, was the same: you need lots of specific details to make them believable. It is, by far, the hardest aspect of writing science fiction because you must not only come up with the details, but they must mesh and they must be believable. You must have the skill to create suspension of disbelief and maintain it throughout.

Within science-fiction, there are a number of genres, most of which Koontz does not deal with by name, but rather indirectly, via a discussion between writing near-future vs far-future stories. It would be of no surprise to any sci-fi writer that writing near-future is far harder than writing about the far future. The former requires extensive research and a skill for extrapolation, while the latter is more speculative and relies more on imagination. Whether you choose one or the other, the key to success lies in making it cohesive. If something stands out as a red flag, you must world-build to a sufficient degree to sell the red flag to an editor.

Chapter 13 deals with pitfalls and how to avoid them. Rather than summarize them, I’ll focus on the takeaway since it’s one that I rarely see emphasized: “a writer is only in competition with himself.”

There is also a short, somewhat useful section on overcoming writer’s block, but nothing that one couldn’t find via an internet search.

I skimmed Chapter 14 (Selling) because I think most of it is out of date. When it comes to selling, pretty much any of the books below are a far better investment of your time and money:

• Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Publishing (WMG Writer’s Guide) (Volume 5)
• Killing the Top Ten Sacred Cows of Indie Publishing: A WMG Writer’s Guide (WMG Writer’s Guides Book 6)
• The Magic Bakery: Copyright in the Modern World of Fiction Publishing (A WMG Writer’s Guide)
• Creating Your Author Brand (WMG Writer’s Guides Book 16)
• Discoverability (WMG Writer’s Guide) (Volume 7)
• Closing the Deal…on Your Terms: Agents, Contracts, and Other Considerations (WMG Writer’s Guides) (Volume 14)

Chapter 15 consists mainly of a list of best-sellers deemed worthy of study. Like the chapter on selling, it has not aged well, but may be of use to some.

I hope you found these entries as educational as I did. I think that in order to be a successful writer one must continue learning. And it’s particularly difficult when it comes to writing, because so many think that stringing sentences and paragraphs together somehow automatically turns into fiction that will sell.

We can watch someone cook and get a fair idea of what’s involved. We can follow a recipe. But do we ever get to watch someone write? I argue that we cannot.

Even if one were to perch on a writer’s shoulder and watch them work, one would not be privy to what’s going on in the writer’s mind, what thoughts led them there. I think that writers think about writing all the time (even if only subconsciously). We spend a great deal of time inside our own heads before we are ready to sit down and type or put pen to paper. Therefore, even a keen observation of the “writing” process would miss out on all the essentials that went into getting the writer to the point where they sit down and start typing. Perhaps if the writer started giving the observer a running commentary, we might be able to witness the process of creation, but even that would be marred by the commentary itself, for if the writer is explaining to you why he chose one word over another, he is no longer creating.