★ “How to be a faster writer.”

Slate:

In search of the secret of quickness, I started with a Malcolm Gladwell passage that’s always piqued me. InOutliers, he discusses the now famous 10,000-hour rule—the amount of time it takes to achieve true mastery—and quotes the neurologist Daniel Levitin: “In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concern pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again.” Fiction writers? Really?

Had MFA students been sent to a lab and force-fed scones while they typed on their laptops? Or had some intrepid grad student done field research in the Starbuckses of the Eastern seaboard? Alas, nothing so interesting, but something ultimately more fascinating. Gladwell led me to a chapter in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance—the much-cited but little-read (by regular people) academic tome. “Professional Writing Expertise,” by Ronald Kellogg, contains enough writerly insight to fuel a thousand Iowa workshops. And the opening words could not be more comforting: “Writing extended texts for publication is a major cognitive challenge, even for professionals who compose for a living.” See, Dad! This is hard work.

10,000 hours sounds about right. I’ve been writing every day for 15 minutes to 2 hours since I was 10 years old. That’s 15 years times at least 15 minutes each day. I have written at least 1,000 hours in the past 15 years of my calculations are correct which I doubt they are because that feels far less than I thought it would be. I’m no expert though but I am a fast writer.