The Importance of Practice

It is always interesting meeting a new class of creative writing students every year, and asking them how many write between classes. Usually, a couple of students raise their hands. This response always astonishes me, for I cannot think of a single student who plays the piano and does not practice between classes. 

Ray Bradbury once said that the best thing a beginner or an intermediate writer could do was to write short stories. And write a lot of them! He went on to say that if students wrote a story a week for a year, they would have 52 short stories, and it would be impossible for all of them to be bad. Quantity, he suggested, created quality.

Malcolm Gladwell, argues similarly in his recent book, 'Outliers: The Story of Success'. Using the Beatles as an example, Gladwell claims that the Beatles only became the world-class musicians we know and love today, by performing regularly early in their career. Gladwell calculates the Beatles spent about 10,000 hours practising their music by playing gigs in Hamburg, Germany, between 1960-1964. Gladwell calls this the '10,000-hour rule', and goes on to argue that to become an expert in any field, it is just a matter of practising the skills required in that field over and over again for at least 10,000 hours. 

Intuition Educational Support recognises the importance of practice and will be soon introducing an option for students to practice their writing online-

Watch this space!