Wednesday, November 30

Ten thousand hours

Does it really take 10 thousand hours of practice to become a good reader or writer?

The definition of "mastery" is 10,000 hours. You can certainly become good at something before that. Although by that logic and definition, most 18 year olds in the US today are masters at video games.

I'd say that there are different readers and writers, painters and politicians, roofers and cement masons, and that anybody who actually believes some catchall rule about an artistic endeavor is full of shit.

I don't know about being a "good reader," but I'd say it takes that much to develop a sophisticated sense of literature. Doesn't matter how many books 10,000 hours is, as long as the reading is close and not just skimming. Reader no (quality/diversity not quantity), but writer yes if /lit/'s output is anything to go by. I have probably spent 10,000 hours reading. Since i was a kid my mom had me reading anything i can get my hands on and forced me to join the library and to borrow 2 books every time i exchanged the old ones.

People are different. They have different brains that are good for different things. The amount of practice required to reach full potential differs from person to person. Sentence structure written across the Internet, Blogs, Forums, and comments is no accurate reflection of one understanding of literature or other academic fields he/she may have studied. I imagine very few people proofread their posts let alone write them in a formal manner. Personally I couldn't care less for one need to inform us about his/her erudition. I never understood why so many people have to provide useless information on Internet.

One thing that is absolutely true is that if you want to be good at something you need to practice. There might be people that write amazing stories the first time they write but that is only because they got lucky and happened to write in a style that happened to appeal to others. So either practice or pray to god you where born with amazing taste.

You write a book. It gets published. It gets decent reviews. People come up to you and tell you they like your book. You can buy some food with money earned from your book. You are a good author.

For those who casually bragging about an intuitive understanding of plot, not prose. One could have checked out dozens and dozens of trashy pulp novels. Plot is not nearly as difficult to comprehend as prose is. 

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