There are so many things that I wish I was good at. I mean naturally good at. It seems like some people are just able to do things without much effort and the necessary skills just come naturally to them. Often we only see what we want to see. We don’t see the hard work and the hours that they have committed when we weren’t watching them win Olympic medals, or invent ice cream that doesn’t melt (it could happen!).

It is said that in order to reach a professional level in any discipline, there is a 10,000 hours rule, which means that if you commit 10,000 hours to a particular sport or hobby you will likely have reached a professional or at least semi professional level of ability. Another way of looking at that of course is that to call it dedication to a goal. Committing that much time to anything is huge and a person must be really determined to donate so much of their life to one area of expertise. There is something else to this though, you have to enjoy it, a lot. Not the success or the endgame, but the hard slog, the hours of struggle, of not getting it right. If you don’t, how can you possibly commit all that time to developing the skill.

I have found the same with my writing experience. It is great to put the final piece out there, sometimes they are accepted by magazines or the books get published, sometimes people even say they enjoyed it! But a lot of the enjoyment comes from spending time getting that sentence just right, the rewrites, getting the inspiration for a new character from something you overheard on the train. It is the commitment to keep getting better that is important. I certainly haven’t put 10,000 hours into this as yet and I haven’t really measured how much time I spend writing. It is sporadic, depending on when I have time each day, sometimes it might only be 10 minutes. But all that time, committed to doing something I enjoy, will make me better at it. The fun is in learning what works and what doesn’t, overcoming the hurdles, reviewing your mistakes.

Before I put my latest novella out there it will be getting another review. The finished (is it ever finished?) book has been put aside for a few months whilst I wrestle with book covers, graphics etc. As time as passed, I hope that I have developed my writing skills even further, and that allows me to spot things that I might not have seen before. Like a photographer doesn’t know what a good photo is until they have took lots of bad photos and understood what they need to avoid. It is useful to then reapply what you have learned to older works and see how or if you can improve them. It is not always about perfection, but creating the best thing that you can at that time. Many writers will look back on previous works and understand that it might not have been very good, compared to what they write currently. But they needed to write the not as good book to get to the better one.

But I am still terrible at DIY, and I am OK with that.

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