Brad isn't clever. 30 minutes. Unfiltered. Every day. Rinse. Repeat.

Trying to find the optimal time to write every day is difficult thus far. I’m currently writing right before my improv troupe meets for practice. As much as I want to do this writing and be able to sit down and focus on it, it’s harder than usual. I think there’s some sort of stress in the back of my mind that prevents me from focusing fully on everything. It’s stress related to the thought that I could possibly be late to practice. Whereas I want part of my goal in these writing assignments to be shutting down my internal filters, I want another part to be learning to drown out those other voices… those distracting thoughts that nag me in the back of my mind. For now, I’ve got 30 minutes to write and I should focus on nothing else. If the phone rings, I won’t answer it. If my roommate comes to my door, I’ll have to turn him away. Those are factors of which I have no external control… The ones that will be harder to turn back are the thoughts that I do control. I can’t let them get in the way of progress, however slow or clunky it is.

What is there to write about now? I’ve been listening to a few audiobooks lately and I’ve found some things I enjoy in them. I started downloading audiobooks with Stephen King’s “On Writing” (side note: the incredible urge to check Google to see if it’s Steven or Stephen is quite overwhelming… but I’ll shut it out. I don’t care. You will know who I’m referring to.) On Writing is really quite good, as it’s interesting to hear about King’s background and his advice on the subject. It’s even more entertaining since there are a ton of critics who loathe the writer and dismiss him as culturally irrelevant. I think many of those critics would view a film “On Moviemaking” by Michael Bay the same way. On one hand, Bay’s films are wildly successful. On another, they are very rarely, if ever, critically acclaimed. You wont’ find many film students in any college aspiring to be the next Michael Bay. Similarly, you won’t find many English students or Creative Writing MFA students hoping to become known for a wide catalogue of horror books.

Regardless, King offers good advice to any writer. First, the maxim I’ve referred to several times: “Just write.” He discusses a few different authors who have various strategies of writing every day. Some would write for 30 minutes and just set the pen down mid-thought at the end of that period, only to pick it back up the next day. Entire books were written that way. I don’t think I’m going to write books that way, but I may set aside some time to tackle an actual scriptwriting process in a similar fashion. If anything, regular exercise is a good idea.

King also believes that there are writers who are beyond help (let’s call them awful writers). On the other end of the spectrum, there are the prodigies that probably never benefitted from learning how to improve their writing. Instead, they were more or less born with an amazing gift and turned out glorious work after glorious work. In between, you’ve got bad writers, average writers, good writers, and even a few great writers. As you would probably guess, there’s a pyramid shape to the distribution of writers. Most writers fall into the awful category (I would argue that bad would probably suffice for most… I’m not a grizzled veteran writer, so I have at least some sort of idealistic hope that most writers at least have a chance), fewer fall into the bad category, fewer still into average, etc.

King argues that it’s possible to traverse from bad to average, from average to good, and possibly from good to great. However, he thinks writers are trapped in the awful and amazing categories. King seems to imply (at least, via my interpretation) he thinks writers can emerge from one of those four middle categories to another, but rarely can they move into the one following that. For instance, a writer could go from bad to average, but probably never make it from average to good in his time.

Again, I lack King’s experience, but I would think that with enough practice, writers would be able to make a few jumps. It might take a lot more effort for some people, but there’s bound to be a way.

I’ve also been listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s books Blink and Outliers on audiobook. I can see why they are bestsellers… He tells a very compelling story and has a gift to astound his readers with these connections he makes between seemingly unrelated subjects. I have a problem with how polished most of these stories feel (you can find more than a few articles on how dangerous Gladwell’s writing seems to be if you look for them… I’d recommend the discussion in one of the Out of the Game podcasts from late 2009 if you want to hear both sides of that argument), but there are a few arguments he makes that seem to be basic sense.

One that’s grown increasingly controversial from his critics is the thought that all of society’s outliers (the rare breed of super successful individuals in the top 1% of their discipline) got there because of a mixture of opportunity and hard work. Notably, Gladwell argues that all outliers clocked in at least 10,000 hours of work to become experts in their fields. I’m sure it’s not a hard and fast requirement as he would have you believe, but it seems to make sense as a generic guideline. If I put 10,000 hours of work into learning how to play the synthesizer, I would hope that I’d be pretty damn good at it.

I’ve grown a lot as an improviser, but I have no idea how many hours of stage time or rehearsal I’ve actually gone through. I’ll have to look into that sometime, I imagine it’s somewhere between 500 and 1000 hours. I’d hope closer to 1000. I can imagine that multiplying my time doing improv by 10 would make me quite good. I can think of a few improvisers who seem to be very very good without 10,000 hours of experience.

I guess that’s my argument. If any writer puts in 10,000 hours of practice, they would hopefully be pretty good at what they are doing. I don’t think all writers require that kind of practice to be experts, but they would all benefit from it.

Another element of Gladwell’s thesis in “Outliers” involves opportunities presenting themselves for all the people. Essentially, external factors outside of their control. Most of the Canadian hockey elite seem to come from a narrow window of birth months that enabled them to be more physically mature at a younger age and thrive in youth leagues. Bill Gates lucked into his school having early access to a computer. There are other stories.

At Austin Film Festival, a lot of the TV writers seemed to mention something similar. Mitch Hurwitz got his first job writing for Golden Girls not because of sheer talent (that clearly helped him hold onto his job), but because he was chosen by his peers to give a speech at his high school’s graduation and one of the Golden Girls producers was in the crowd.

For one reason or another, people often seem to succeed from being in the “right place” at the “right time”. I do think a lot of that is out of your external control, but there are still things you can do… factors your can manipulate to increase the odds. Maybe you can find several “right places” to be and just hope you are inhabiting the exact one you need to be in when the “right time” rolls around.

Things like networking seem to be very important, especially in the entertainment industry. I’ve always associated that word with people who schmooze way too often, but I think those are just bad networkers. I’m genuinely interested in meeting lots of people, and if I can help out some of those people with my limited resources, I think it would be a worthwhile investment. One of those people may get my back one day. I wouldn’t expect them to do so, nor would I go out of my way to aggressively ask them to hook me up with something, but I would imagine that if I lead with a decent enough example, people would treat me with the same kindness and respect.

Again, there’s no guarantee any of that would work, but it might help anyone’s odds. Besides, the world could use more people who are less selfish and more helpful. It’s just more practical that way.