Stop me if you’ve heard this before…

No, don’t stop me. I need to get in my 10,000 hours of blogging. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, makes a convincing case that one of the key precursors to human success is 10,000 hours of practice. That’s the difference between a grade one and orchestral violinist – 10,000 hours of practice.

But every new task also needs that practice time. I can write; I am lucky enough to be able to write a wide variety of texts. But every new novel also needs, if not 10,000 hours, an awful lot of them. You can only find out how to write a novel by writing it. There’s no short cut. 

My latest revision is coming along beautifully. At last I’m truly happy with the narrative voice, which has been bothering me for two years. I think I’ve done enough practice now to do the real thing.

Word count: 5557

http://www.gladwell.com/