10,000 hours
10,000 hours. That’s the amount of time author Malcolm Gladwell speculates it takes a person to master a craft; this from his most recent best-selling non-fiction book “Outliers”. And in this LA Times article, journalist Rachel Abramowitz takes up the question with some notable Hollywood folks including Dustin Hoffman:
Hoffman famously did not land his career-making role in “The Graduate” until he was almost 30 years old. He spent the previous 10 years (the amount of time Gladwell says it takes to accumulate the 10,000 hours) struggling to make it in theater and film in New York City, but most of that period he actually wasn’t working as an actor. “I know I’ve said it a million times, but it’s not the worst thing in the world to be unemployed, because a writer can write, a painter can paint, but an actor can’t act without a job. That’s what’s painful, you’ve got to have the job,” says Hoffman.
When asked if 10 years primarily waiting tables or doing temp jobs counts in the quest for 10,000 hours, Gladwell, reached by phone, explains: “The question is not at what point you’re capable of doing your job. The question is at what point you’ve mastered it.”
Gladwell notes that “there is a raging debate among psychologists whether there is such a thing as innate talent. I’m on the side that says there really isn’t. If it does exist, it plays a small role. I’m much more convinced of the contribution of practice and effort to make excellence.” Before making “The Graduate,” “Dustin may not have been acting, but he was thinking about acting. He was studying. He was engaging mentally, emotionally, psychologically in the difficult art of assuming a character.”
I’ve heard that a writer needs to write 1,000,000 words before they can really understand writing. There’s even this poet and short story writer who set out to write one million words in 2008.
I attended a session one time featuring screenwriter-director Larry Kasdan in which he talked about how he wrote 10 screenplays before he sold anything — and it was my impression that he felt like he had to write all of those scripts before he ‘deserved’ his shot.
10,000 hours? 1,000,000 words? 10 screenplays? Is there some actual minimum level of work we need to put in to understand what we’re doing as writers? Granted, some writers may have a more innate grasp of the craft than others, but that still presupposes everybody needs to to put X amount of time into actual writing to master it.
And then the next question: Can we actually master the craft? Does a writer ever stop learning?