Yesterday I was giving a ton of thought to my writing, and how I’ve been going about it. Writing books everywhere state that you should “Write every day!” When I was writing pretty close to every day during NaNoWriMo ’10, I noticed certain things about how I generated ideas and got things done. I haven’t noticed those things in my writing since, except for tiny sporadic bursts that never last.
Earlier this week I read most of Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. I got bored and gave up on it during the second half, but the first half of the book really got me thinking. For instance, the second chapter is all about how The Beatles became The Beatles. They took a gig playing in the red light district in Hamburg Germany, and they played eight hours a night, every night. They had to learn all sorts of songs to keep people entertained, much more than the 1-3 hour sets that are standard. All that practice gave them so many hours playing, and after that year in Hamburg, they were masters of their instruments, and then Beatlemania happened. During the trips they were in Hamburg they played live an estimated 1200 times. That is amazing!
The big theme of Outliers is that people who are masters of their craft, have 10,000 hours of practice in. That’s a hell of a lot of hours. Do the math on the Beatles playing 1200 times at 7-8 hours a stretch. Pretty damn close eh?
I have a lot of time invested in my writing, but I don’t have anywhere near that much. I have all sorts of hang ups still, and I know I need to work on it. One of my things is that I can figure out what a character will do in a situation, but I have no idea how to get them to the next situation. Or how they would even get in that first situation in the first place! All the writing prompts I see are ‘create a story using these X words,’ or ‘here’s this situation, how does it get resolved?’
I need some variety from that, something to flex other creative muscles. I’m going to make up at least two hats filled with possibilities, say character traits/stock characters, and maybe settings? I’m not entirely sure yet what the categories are going to be. I’m thinking maybe I even take some famous movie/tv/literary characters and just write scenes where they interact. I’m still sorting that bit out, but it seems like the thing to do right now.
I know in some ways I’m a superior writer to other people, but in others I’m vastly inferior. I’m hoping that creating exercises like these will help me work on my deficient areas. After all, what I really need is time and experience…
ducttapesamurai 