Overnight Success?

The Beatles, remember them? 

They were that little band that apparently jumped from Liverpool to stardom overnight.

One of the band’s earliest gigs was performing near military bases in Hamburg Germany. They played eight hours a day, seven days a week, for eighteen months. So the band that seemed to drop out of nowhere had already played together for an astonishing 1,200 gigs by the time their first single hit the charts.

This may seem daunting, for it appears that some youngsters come out of the starting gate and win the race. But we don't know those people--we don't like them either.

Long ago I read that it takes 20 years to make a writer.

I asked if that came with a guarantee, but no one answered.

I dove in any way.  I decided that I wanted to be a writer, and I was willing to put in the time.

It’s been a fantastic 20 years, but I am not a rich by being a writer yet, my writing doesn’t sparkle as some do, (Dear Ray Bradbury, I’m still reading and writing), no major publishing house has bought my work.

Am I a failure?

Naugh.  I have expressed myself. I have studied. I have learned something about writing, (I have found that it is an endless process), and I have found that writing helps clarify my life. I write because I want to know what I am thinking. And I write because my intuition, that part that does not think) tells me to.

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliners said it takes 10,000 hours to be “a world-class expert.”and he's the one who used the Beatles as an example.

"World class expert." Perhaps we don't have to be one to be successful, maybe he's wrong, or on the possibility that he's right perhaps we are willing to put in the hours.there's the catch.  And consider, maybe he's wrong.

Stephen King said, “I’ve written because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side–I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.”

“Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it’s the answer to everything. … It’s the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it’s a cactus.”
—Enid Bagnold

“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”
—Ernest Hemingway

(There go the "world-class experts.")

“Writers live twice.”
—Natalie Goldberg

Yep, that’s what I was saying, only they said it better.