Today I have a guest post from my good friend, Liz Chapman! She's an actress and a poet and several other things, but most importantly a good friend to me and Seve. I've asked her to muse about the craft of writing. You can check out her blog here.
My mom recalls the first word I ever wrote. “Snake.” I’m not sure what sort of psychological implications that particular word has, but I like that my mom remembers that. (She does not, however, remember the first word I ever said.) I think I’ve always been a writer. I hate phrases like that. “I’ve always been a writer.” It’s absurdly pretentious. But I guess it’s true. I didn’t realize it until 8th grade or so, and even then, it wasn’t some earth-shattering realization. The fact that I wrote things didn’t seem noteworthy to me. It was just something I did.
The earth-shattering realization I’m having now is that if I have any sort of aptitude for writing, it’s more because of repetition and practice than any kind of innate talent. I don’t have an enormous publication record that started when I was 11 or something crazy like that. But I have been keeping regular journals since 8th grade. I’ve been blogging for around ten years. My minor in college was English. And after doing something fairly regularly for long enough, you start to figure it out.
Have you heard of the “10,000 hour rule”? Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea in his book, “Outliers.” The basic idea is that if you spend 10,000 hours doing something, you become an expert at it. I think the truth is probably more complicated, but I think I agree that time equals expertise.
Take Ray Bradbury. When Ray Bradbury was a kid, he used to hang around traveling carnivals and circuses that came into town. When he was 12, the carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, touched Bradbury with his sword and said, “Live forever!” Bradbury said later, “I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped.”
And when he says he started writing every day, he meant it. He wrote 1,000 words a day. Every day. And he says that for the first ten years, most of it was pretty bad. And then, when he was 22, he sat at the typewriter and wrote out the short story “The Lake.” It took him two hours, and when he finished, he said that he was sitting at the typewriter, weeping, because he realized that he “had turned a corner in becoming a writer.” He said he realized that he’d written the first short story that was really good. After ten years, a thousand words a day of writing.
Here’s what’s truly beautiful about that story. He persisted in doing something every single day for ten years before he felt he was any good at it. That’s amazing. Maybe I’m just a crappy person, but I can’t think of a single thing I’d be willing to do for ten years without being good at it. I’m too impatient. I think I’d give up after a few months. My track record of trying new things has a pretty steady pattern: If I’m okay at it, if I can figure it out, I keep going. If I suck, I tend to give it up.
But I’m learning a valuable lesson from Bradbury, and from Tina Fey, and from fellow English teachers, and from every other talented and accomplished person that I admire. That for the majority of people, there’s this uncomfortable beginning and middle stage of just not being any good. You may have one glimmering tiny moment of success, and if you’re passionate about something, it can sustain you for a year. And then you’ll have another little glimpse of success, and that will carry you through another year. And then, after a long while, you’ll turn a corner, and the moments of accomplishment will happen more often, with fewer times of not being any good.
I think it will always be difficult. Writing, I mean. Or acting. Or teaching. Or anything. I don’t think you ever get to a point where it’s easy. But if you do something enough, you’ll get to a point where, like Ray Bradbury, you look back and realize that you’ve written 27 novels, and 600+ short stories, and that most of them are pretty good.
Or maybe you’ll just start with a guest blog post or two.
(Thanks to the Ray Bradbury website and Random House Audible’s audiobook “The Fantastic Tales of Ray Bradbury” for the stories!)
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