The other day I was speaking with a friend who shares an interest in writing. He earned his B.A. in English Literature and was particularly influenced by the work of William Faulkner and James Joyce. I, too, read all of Faulkner when I was a teenager, and while I never had the patience to read Joyce’s flagship work, Ulysses, in my youth I did read Finnegan’s Wake and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as well as the works of many other writers including in particular Hemingway, Dos Passos, Melville, Conrad, Shakespeare, dozens of English and American poets and, in translation, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Hesse, Hugo, Stendhal and many others.
Knowing that I have employed and managed professional journalists, my friend asked me if I taught them how to become better writers. I had to think for a minute, and when I answered it was to explain that in my opinion the ability to write proficiently is not a thing that can be merely taught. It can be learned, but it is not like a basic trade such as plumbing, auto repair or carpentry. In fact, to become an accomplished writer one must first become an experienced reader.
Competent writing, like any complex skill, requires that the mental tools upon which it relies are absorbed into the mind. Just as a baseball player cannot stop to think about how to hit or catch a ball, for the writer it must become instinctive to choose the best words and to place them in the best order. And to create that foundation requires one to read widely and extensively.
There is something about learning complex skills called the rule of ten thousand hours. It states that to master any difficult profession–say brain surgery, or designing computers, or catching a flying baseball–requires practice, lots of practice. Nothing in this life comes easily, and that’s especially true when it comes to top-tier achievement.
And it is not as simple as practicing the art itself, for one must first be immersed in the wider subject. As an example, to achieve mastery as a brain surgeon one must first know anatomy, neurology, biochemistry, toxicology, and so forth. The computer engineer must know electronics and mathematics and physics. The ball player must have engaged in physical conditioning. All that must be in place before they can excel.
So to become a master of the written word, you first must immerse yourself in the world of words, and for that there is no substitute for reading. And, as in the case of my friend and myself, that does not mean reading the National Enquirer, trash romance novels or comic books. It means a serious, lifelong commitment to reading and there is no substitute for that.
I recently had a conversation that concerned the script for a thirty second video clip. I owned and managed an ad agency for twenty years and the other party assured me he knew all about writing ads. He explained that he had learned it by… wait for it … watching thousands of hours of television.
That is like a person who has spent a decade watching baseball games stepping up to the plate for the first time ever and expecting to hit a ball traveling at ninety miles per hour into the upper center field stands. No, it doesn’t work that way. Not for baseball and not for writing. To be a master writer requires that you are already an accomplished reader.