“It is the time that you’ve wasted for
your rose that makes your rose so important.” from The Little Prince by Antoine de
Saint Exupery
Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers:
The Story of Success, describes the amount of "pure practice and investment in time to move beyond mastery to
actual expertise as somewhere around ten thousand hours." Perhaps
there is such a thing as innately talented writers, but in reality, writing
requires extensive practice. Trial and error directs most of us as we struggle
to get words on the page.
Gladwell cites studies in which “the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the
smaller role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation
and practice seems to play. . . . Excellence
at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice and
it surfaces repeatedly in studies of expertise. It takes the brain about ten
thousand hours to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true
mastery.” The 10,000-hour rule translates into more than ten years of
consistent practice where the daily process accumulates, increasing proficiency
and expertise.
Even if you are smart - if you don’t work at getting
in the practice time you’re not likely to play at Carnegie Hall or anywhere
else - other than your living room.
“Practice isn’t the thing you do once
and then you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” Writers,
like concert violinists, don’t get their expertise from thin air. They work
at it. Writers tending their rose are not wasting time; they are nurturing the
rose to find its beautiful center.
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About Jan Bowman
Winner of the 2011 Roanoke Review Fiction Award, Jan's stories have been nominated
for Pushcart Prizes, Best American Short
Stories, and a Pen/O’Henry award. Glimmer Train named a recent
story as Honorable Mention in the November 2012 Short Story Awards for New
Writers. A recent story was a
finalist for the 2013 Broad
River Review RASH Award for Fiction,
another story was a 2013 finalist in the Phoebe Fiction Contest; another was a 2012 finalist in
the “So
To Speak” Fiction Contest. Jan’s fiction has appeared in numerous publications including, Roanoke Review,
Big Muddy, The Broadkill Review, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo Spree (97),
Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes and others.
Jan is working on
two collections of short stories while shopping for a publisher for a completed
story collection, Mermaids & Other
Stories. She has nonfiction publications in Trajectory and Pen-in-Hand. She writes a weekly blog of “Reflections” on the writing life and posts regular interviews
with writers and publishers. Learn
more at: www.janbowmanwriter.com or visit
blog: http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com
Facebook: janbowman.77@facebook.com
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