You’ve no doubt heard the phrase. To effectively master any skill or craft, you must devote at least ten thousand hours to learning its finer points. It’s an adage taken from Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, and while widely quoted (and much debated), I don’t think it was meant to be taken literally. As you can imagine, there are many variables, not least your genetic predisposition and the type of tuition you receive. Are you engaged in education? And what was your level of skill to start with? Bearing this 10k figure in mind, then, it got me thinking. How long to transform into an expert writer? What would that figure look like in real terms? And would that help us all better gauge our own process? It sounds achievable, but how long does it take to become an expert writer? And what would ten thousand hours look like if you started from scratch?
The time it takes in theory
So, let’s break it down. Let’s say you have supernatural powers and never need to sleep like Dracula or Bradley Cooper’s character from the film ‘Limitless’. On that basis, you would write for four hundred and sixteen days before your fiction was of a professional standard. Ultimately, that’s just over a year, which sounds pretty good. But, of course, everyone needs to sleep. And some more than others (cough, cough), so let’s switch the scenario up.
Let’s take into account the fact that you need to sleep, eat, and stay healthy. Actually, let’s assume you treat writing like a full-time job. So that’s typing for eight hours a day, five days a week, breaking for half an hour at lunch. In total, a forty-hour week. Naturally, this is all highly unlikely as most of us need to work for a living at our day jobs. But still, at this estimate, you’d need to write for two hundred and fifty weeks, or the best part of five years, to reach the level of an expert from a standing start.
That time in reality
OK, so we’ve had some fun. But sadly, most of us aren’t paid a stipend or remittance by a wealthy benefactor. Our days are spent working. The exact number of hours will look different for everyone, but let’s assume you work full-time. Given that you must commute, eat, sleep, wash, and socialise too, how many hours does that leave for writing?
Ten hours a week for writing means two hours each weekday. You can fit this in before work or after. Or do both, using a bit of your lunch break. Either way, ten hours a week, consistently, is a realistic target. Weekends in this scenario are kept free because you need to rest, for goodness’ sake. Some people work all Saturday or Sunday, which is fine, but I’ll include that in the following example.
At a consistent ten hours a week, you’ll turn from a novice to an expert in one thousand weeks. Which is about nineteen years. Yep, you read that right. Nineteen years, give or take. OK, that sounds way too long. So let’s speed that up to twenty hours a week of writing. In that case, we reach expert level in nine and a half years.
But hold up a minute. Twenty hours a week – when you work full time – is quite a challenge. It means two hours each weekday without fail, then ten hours split over the weekend. Week in, week out. Good luck if you have children or a lengthy commute (or both).
How long to transform into an expert writer: caveats
Right now, I manage between twelve to fifteen hours a week. But it hasn’t always been like this. There have been times in my life – when I had a neurological illness, for example – when I was writing for about thirty hours a week. Not very well, granted, but I had huge blocks of time. Conversely, there have been other busier times, such as when I worked in London and was lucky to write for more than five hours every seven days.
On average, I reckon I’ve spent twelve hours a week writing because that factors in time spent on holiday or periods when I’ve been unfocused. And so that puts me at around sixteen years to reach an expert level from a standing start.
Was it a standing start, though, given my writing level as a film graduate? In retrospect, yes, it was. Most of us can write as a given, but sitting down and constructing fiction is another thing entirely. If it was simple, anyone could do it. Ninety-nine per cent of submitted stories wouldn’t be rejected. And if it was easy, it wouldn’t need so many fricking drafts. The bottom line is that story-telling through prose is a craft, like anything else. Unfortunately, we don’t learn it at school, meaning it’s roughly ten thousand hours from the first words we write.
As alluded to earlier, however, it’s not always ten thousand hours. If you’re humble and open-minded, you’ll recognise that you need to learn from a tutor or mentor. You’ll read noted texts on the discipline, and you won’t feel satisfied with just one. You’ll read widely and not let constructive feedback or rejection throw you off. Guess who didn’t do any of that to start with?
Do all these things; perhaps you’ll only need eight or nine thousand hours. Ignore this advice; you may risk lengthening the number to eleven or twelve. Given your average weekly number of hours, this could extend the time it takes massively.
In summary
I wish I’d taken the time to work this all out before I started. At least then, I could have better set my expectations and avoided foolhardy heartache and disappointment. But given my average is roughly twelve hours a week, where am I now? Haha, well, by my own rough estimates, I’m closing in on the ten-thousand-hour mark as you read this.
Of course, I may need twelve thousand hours. Given my stubborn pig-headedness at the start of this whole process, it may well be twenty thousand. Either way, this exercise should serve as a helpful guide. And ultimately, what is mastery anyway? We always keep learning. It could be writing, golf, or basket weaving. No matter your passion, I hope you feel better if it takes you longer than expected to reach your desired level. You’ll get there if you’re consistent and make it your sole focus.
Think I’m wrong? Or are you one of those outliers that master things pretty quickly? Either way, let me know in the comments section. Or you check out all the other places on this website where I talk about writing, tech, and science fiction. Although (disclaimer), I may well be wrong there too.