10,000 Hours

On the eve of my 29th birthday all I can think is I don't want to work. I've been reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, a book which I'm teaching my freshmen this semester, and one of its principle theories is that in order to be a real master at whatever it is you want to do--guitar playing, football, law, writing--you've got to put in 10,000 hours. Do the calculations, or don't: either way you've gotta know this is a fuckload of time.

The first day of class I asked my students to calculate how long they've been students. We figured if they went to school for 8 hours a day, about 200 days per year, that after 7 years they'd just hit the 11,000-hour mark. But then I asked them how much of that time they'd spent truly being a student, being intellectually as well as physically present. Most said it was less than half that amount of time, a few said they spent little time at all being real students. After giving these students high-fives for their honesty I insisted they get their asses in gear, that they wouldn't live forever. Then they got scared and looked at me funny, in the same way I often look at my own reflection in the mirror.

All this made me think of myself, how much time I've spent being a real writer. I decided in earnest I liked to write when I was in high school, but because it came so easily I spent little time on it. My writing and journaling and private ideas English teachers force us to share for a grade were the only moments in school in which I received positive recognition. So maybe I spent a little more time on my journals than on math. I didn't treat writing like a genuine skill to be built and crafted until much later. Sadly, my seriousness about writing came even after graduate school, which I look back now as three years where I probably put in a full 10,000 hours toward my mastery of drinking and self-loathing.

In college I took workshops: nonfiction, poetry, fiction, playwriting. When I received an assignment I thought about it nonstop for days. Then, the night before it was due I wouldn't sleep. I'd crank. Write for hours, stop to look outside the window or clean the toilets or long for someone to love me, and then write again. Editing was something real writers did and I was only 19, after all. I figured I'd still produce something better than the rest of the class and to my detriment, that was usually true.

In graduate school I took workshops, all of the above. The only difference was such a misguided one I want to slay the seven-years-ago me: I truly believed all the hard work was over. I'd gotten here, after all, to the hallowed halls of Allen at LSU. Not everyone gets into an MFA program, and many many would-be writers are placed on hold. But I got in and got funded immediately. True, I probably had some strings pulled by my undergrad professors who loved me, but however I got in, I was in. This is the problem, I suppose, with allowing 21 year olds to pursue the MFA. Or at least me at 21. Then and now I've no discernable skill besides my desire to write. And as you know from reading the first sentence of this blog, though I'm approaching an advanced age, I sometimes still don't want to put in the work I know is necessary.

So I'm writing this now with the recognition I've got to put in the work, but I'm still trying to figure my own writerly calculations. How close am I to 10,000 hours? This depends on how one views a skill such as writing. If you want to be Jimi Hendrix, yeah, you've got to practice on the guitar for hours on end. In that situation I don't think just listening to good music counts.

But I wonder if it's different with writing. Are the recordable moments only the ones in which hand grips pen, or finger bounces on keyboard? Moments in which words, sentences, paragraphs are created? Though I'm clearly trying to compensate for my skinny hours, I do think other times should be incorporated if one wants to write: time thinking about your work, time reading the dictionary, learning new words, time studying what others' work is like and what should be avoided and embraced, time editing your work and reading it and loving and hating it. Maybe even time recognizing how much time you've put in so far in your life?

Some of this time has to count. If not, I'm alright, I'm okay, but here's what my calculations look like: I've written about one hour per day, seven days a week, for the last eleven years. That brings my total hours to just over 4,000. With this blog and some other journaling I did this morning I suppose I'm at 4,001. If I put my ass in gear the same way I've asked my students to and double that amount of time to 14 hours per week, 52 weeks a year, I'll reach my 10,000 hours right around my 36th birthday. And I can live with that. Prodigious writers who reach brilliance early often burn out early as well. Or they die: Keats, Shelley, Plath, Sexton, David Foster Wallace, etc. And I certainly don't want to die. Thus, the hours come slowly. (See how that works?)

But still I'm back where I began, not wanting to work. I so don't want to that my desk plant, the one with the ironing-board-shaped leaves, is reaching toward the window because in lieu of the water it needs, it will take the sun. Knowing this I'm still too lazy to give it water. Doing so might make me forget that I've sat here to write. Outside my window the pine needles want less cold, more sun, and turn brown despite themselves. Listlessly they hang. Listlessly so do I. But if I note at least a little of what I think and see as I sit here, so not wanting to work, then I've done something. I've spent five minutes more.