How does one 'deliberately practice' writing? Using longer words, writing more? It's not like the most successful writers or writings are the most complicated. Maybe it's also about 'pitching' ideas, networking, but this could be seen as a separate skill than just writing. Finding the optimal linear regression of what people want.
“Writing is a skill like any other, and the famous 10,000 hour rule should apply, and it does, but not in the way you might assume. A prolific writer can usually churn out about 1000 reasonably decent words in an hour, so if you count in words, it might seem like 10 million words would be enough. Or at 4 hours a day, 250 days a year, about 10 years.
The problem is everybody writes. And yes, things like emails count. So any idiot can clock that many words in 10 years even if they only do a lot of casual/work email and texting. ...
What matters is not how much you write, but how much you rewrite. ...
The HUGE difference between everyday writing that everybody does and serious writing is the proportion that is re-writing. I'd estimate that for non-writers, rewriting accounts for maybe 10-20% of their writing.
For serious writers, it accounts for anywhere between 50-90% depending on how critical the particular piece is. ...”
1) Write something, then look at what you wrote, and try to figure out how it can be improved
2) Read works from great writers, figure out what they did that made them great
3) There are plenty of good books that will help you improve quickly when you are first starting. The key here is to work on improving, not just doing.
4) You really have to work at it. Stephen King suggested that aspiring authors should be working at improving their writing eight hours a day.
Depends, what do you want to improve? If you are looking for general feedback, getting an editor or a coach to assist you can go a long way. Someone to offer valued feedback. There is a reason writers so often thank their editors.
Ben Franklin is an interesting story in how one can deliberately improve their writing.
But it occurs to me you are equating success in writing skill with success in becoming a popular writer. One can be an excellent writer and still not be financially success or massively popular.
10 years of writing doesn't mean much. What do you mean when you say you spent 10 years writing? What have you done?
That's a tough one, and I'm not sure there's a direct answer.
I suspect, though, that it has a lot to do with taste, specifically as to what it is you enjoy about other people's writing -- not to make your writing more like theirs, but to have a better eye for one's own.
In the same way that many musicians have insisted to me that missing out on opportunity to practice music as a child or a young adult needn't be an obstacle to becoming a serious musician later in life; it's vastly more important, they say, that you listen to music, and develop good taste -- rather than worry so much about "talent" or lost opportunities.
[Maybe it's]... finding the optimal linear regression of what people want.
But this, I think, is definitely not where it's at.
Though we should of course always be aware of hour others are perceiving what we create, ultimately it's not the job of the artist to survey the crowd for what they already know and "what", and give them more of it (though no doubt many artists get by on exactly this modus operandi, and some go on to achieve a great deal of notional success with it).
Rather -- the artist's job is to create experiences their audiences didn't know they wanted, or perhaps even thought they hated (or just didn't like so much) -- but because you've cast it in a new light, you've forced them to look at it differently. And this, necessarily, involves risk along with the near certainty of failure and rejection.
And because so many artists are afraid to cross that threshold -- sticking always either to what they think people will like (but which isn't their own creation), or to something that is their own creation (based on a few early successes), but never veering from that mold or trying anything really new -- we wouldn't say that makes them "fail" as artists, but they do tend to stop growing, and often never become as great as they once thought they could be.
I imagine a big part of it is actually not writing but reading. That is, reading things from people who you would like to write like and trying to emulate what they do.
I guess even better would be to write something and have one of those people look it over and give feedback.
> It's not like the most successful writers or writings are the most complicated
It's been said already but this article is about mastery and you seem to be concerned with success which are two very different things.
