Keeping in line with my earlier post about Deliberate Practice, I found this cool little TEDx talk (see below) about how a high level pianist practices.
It illustrates nicely how it’s not just the amount of time you spend practicing that counts but also how you practice. Worst case, you could be practicing bad habits, actually making yourself poorer at your craft.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not spending the amount of time that I do writing to realize ten years from now that I’ve actually gotten worse at parts of it.
If never get to make a living writing… well, it would be a tough one swallow, but I could take that blow. If I never published another story that would be worse, but if I ever realized I’ve stopped improving, I don’t know if could handle that. Because that would mean that not only that I didn’t publish or become professional, but there would be no chance of that happening some time in the future either. And on top of that I’d become a hack, writing the same crappy sort of stories over and over again.
Toby Backman 