On Setting Goals, Being Honest

One of my big soapbox issues (as my students will attest) is the need for writers to be honest with themselves. I've had the opportunity to earn two graduate degrees in writing, which means that I've been fortunate enough to meet a number of great writers (some of them with books, most of them working toward that goal), as well as some not-so-great writers. In my opinion, the difference between these two camps rarely has anything to do with talent or skill--as Steven King once said (and I'm paraphrasing here), any hack can hack out a decent story every now and then--but with discipline and perseverance.

When you are disciplined, productivity comes along for the ride. This is what separates the wheat from the chaff, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his essay "Creation Myth":

The psychologist Dan Simonton argues that this fecundity is often at the heart of what distinguishes the truly gifted. The difference between Bach and his forgotten peers isn't necessarily that he had a greater ratio of hits to misses. The difference is that the mediocre might have a dozen ideas, while Bach, in his lifetime, created more than a thousand full-fledged musical compositions. A genius is a genius, Simonton maintains, because he can put together such a staggering number of insights, ideas, theories, random observations, and unexpected connections that he almost inevitably ends up with something great. "Quality," Simonton writes, is "a probabilistic function of quantity."

Gladwell also goes on to point out that the person with far more ideas than the rest of us will not only have more successes, but also more failures (as stands to reason). 

So what does this have to do with writing? I've known a lot of people who call themselves writers, yet do very little writing. They are not being productive enough to give themselves a fighting chance at success, and that's a point that I am continually trying to make with my students. It's vital that we walk the walk.

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