Inadequacy

Recently I started listening to Stephen King's book "on writing".

It had me feeling most inadequate I mean this guy was spending thousands of hours writing, and I hadn't been spending nearly that much time writing when I was that age, or since then.

So then I was on a spiral of self-doubt and my mind kept going back to Malcolm Gladwell's ten thousand hour rule from "Outliers". In which he talks about achieving true mastery of something requires 10,000 hours. I was sure I was no where near ten thousand hours, I mean I've been wasting so much of my time... So I have been laboring under the idea that I am nowhere near that many hours and so my writing must be terrible and inane and god-awful, ETC.

Well this evening I was going through a stack of notebooks and papers from high-school and university, and interspersed amongst the math science and history notes and poorly written essays are just scads and scads of bits of creative writing. There are short scenes between two people, there are poems, and short stories and little parody sketches.

Every single notebook, no matter what subject, what year, they all have some bit of writing that I was doing just because I love writing. It absolutely blows me away because I was thinking that I didn't have the experience writing and that my dream of being a writer was hopelessly lost because ten thousand hours is just such a large amount of time.

I hope we can all take a more realistic look at how much we have accomplished and not just look down on ourselves and think of of ourselves as underachievers. I know I have. I've looked at things I've written and thought they were genuinely good and funny, but the thought keeps coming up that I must be mistaken and they can't be because I don't have that 10,000 hours. Or I think I am biased because it's my writing... Well I'll be damned if it isn't just a possibility that I am a good writer?

I know I haven't written as many words as Stephen King had when he was my age, but King is not the measure of all writers. The fact is he writes good stories, but you know what Douglas Adams probably wrote fewer words in his entire life than King had written by the time he was 25, but that doesn't matter because Adams changed my life with the words he wrote and I think he is one of the best most imaginative inventive writers to ever put pen to paper or finger to keyboard. In fact for the first five years after reading Adams my writing was a pale imitation of his. I could never say any of that about Stephen King.