Factors to consider with a learner’s resistance to change. From here

My mother and I saw eye-to-eye on practically nothing. She was a version of me who always had twenty-five more years of experience than I did. I was the version of her who was anti-authoritarian before I was verbal.

But she told me it was twenty years to overnight success. Ira Glass talks about taking the longest of all his creative friends to figure out how saying something signficant works. I probably have him beat. I probably put in over ten thousand hours of practice before I realized the method I had been practicing couldn’t possibly work for a writer with my talent.

The writer I was in my early thirties didn’t just have a lack of developed skills. As a learner, I had a lack of ability to see how learning those skills could have helped me if I wanted them to. When I first got Copper, Youtube was a generation away. The books in the library talked about training a horse that could be ridden or breaking a horse that couldn’t.

There was no information on training a horse that could be ridden but didn’t want to be. I didn’t automatically go with “just keep asking him politely to move forward once he’s tired himself out.” I only tried making him do what I wanted once. But the fuel it added to the existing fire showed me the difference between Copper not wanting to do something and Copper when he was furious.

But letting him exhaust himself and then asking him nicely to move forward if he felt like it sometimes — not always, but sometimes — got him moving in the direction I asked him to. When we first started together, it usually just triggered another tantrum until he got tired of that one, too.

And then one day, he never refused to leave the paddock — even alone — again. It took over a year, but he did it.

I’ve never balked at a challenge. But even I considered just how much work it would take to get where I knew I wanted to be. But to accept I needed to invest that time and energy into my work, I had to put aside my absolutely rock-solid belief I’d had since being a teenager that I just needed to be discovered.

It seemed devastating to be standing on the precipice of realization that everything I could do well wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t that I will always need a line editor. It was that I couldn’t create characters whose journeys were worth being line edited yet.

Anders Ericsson, one of the co-creators of the ten thousand-hour rule talks about how “I have made it a hobby to investigate the stories of such prodigies, and I can report with confidence that I have never found a convincing case for anyone developing extraordinary abilities without intense, extended practice.”

Ten thousand hours is 3-4 hours of practice every day across ten years. But Ericsson specifically says it requires “deliberate practice.” I had written at least a book a year between the ages of eleven and thirty-two. Some years, I managed to write two books in the same calendar year. But none of that was deliberate practice. Until I was twenty-four, I wrote as a genuine hobby. After twenty-four, I wrote with the assumption that there were no rules.

I didn’t start writing with the deliberate intention of learning how to write bigger, more emotionally engaging stories until 2005. I started to see the disconnect between professionals sharing what they really did to succeed vs. what writers heard was the secret to their success.

I keep going back to On Writing, but it’s a perfect example of this. When most writers only talk about King’s quota, they speak as though it is the reason for his success. The true secret to King’s success is when the nail couldn’t hold his rejection slips anymore, he went and got a bigger spike to hold even more of them in the future.

Without meaningful instruction, meaningful practice can’t happen. Writing is a complex system that has multiple moving parts, all of which must work together to produce something larger in the reader than the sum of its parts.

Instructor-taught learners still have to learn through almost as much practice as the self-taught learner went through in their trials and errors. No theoretical knowledge — however it is obtained — becomes a muscle memory that can be used without hours and hours and hours of applied practice.

I was on a panel just at the start of my pivot with a writer who had just joined a writing group. I had just learned about the theory of mastery and its 10,000 hours. When I mentioned it, he said that he joined a critique group so that he wouldn’t have to put all those hours in.

I can’t remember if I told him or not, but I realized at that moment that trying to learn a skill without being dedicated to its learning doesn’t work for most learners. To absorb knowledge to create the ability to do something new as an adult learner is more of an active skill than teaching is.

And none of that meaningful practice can even start unless the writer sees through the dissonance their own brain throws up to keep them wrapped up in their identity of being a ‘no rules’ writer who just needs to be discovered without having to put the effort into learning how to write.

Unpublished writers could at least look at their lack of professional sales and think that maybe the system doesn’t work because it didn’t work for them. “There are no rules” could not be more of a perfect Skinner box for underpublished writers who are good enough to sell the work that emerged on the page in a near-perfect state.

The path of how it came to be that most writers view the rules of writing as anti-authoritarians view authority can be traced through critiques over the past twenty years. But the reality is, a lot of learners arrive in learning spaces today armed with the knowledge that any time spent wasted on learning skills is an hour taken away from their publishing goals.

The older I got, though, the more I realized I wasn’t actually anti-authoritarian. I discovered I’m actually an anarchist. Anarchists believe in respecting wisdom and knowledge, but not authority for authority’s sake. We need to convince learners that they’re not against the foundational structures of learning. They were learning in a methodology that didn’t know how to help them if they didn’t already know how to practice meaningfully.