The next several weeks, we're going to explore a rather strange topic here on The Creative -- video games. Yes, you heard me correctly.
I've always played video games, ever since I was a small child playing back on the original Nintendo system (back when it wasn't a relic or an antique). I've always enjoyed them, occasionally become addicted to this game or that for short stints of time (including all-day marathon games of Civilization 3 just a few years ago), but I never really considered them as a metaphor for creativity or life.
And then I read this article about eighteen-year-old Kevin Birrell, who is just one of five people in the world to hold the rank of Tetris Grand Master. If you're like me, you remember Tetris -- various shapes composed of four adjacent cubes which, for no readily apparent reason, are plummeting down a chasm, and you have to decide where they fall. When you complete a horizontal row, again for no readily apparent reason, the whole row disappears.
Anyway, young Mr. Birrell has become a Grand Master at this game, and several others, and he offered up seven tips for doing so. The more I read these tips, however, the more I realized they also perfectly described what is necessary to make a go of it as a creative. So, we're going to look at his tips, one a week, starting with this week's:
Practice
Yes, Mr. Birrell isn't a video game prodigy -- he has to practice to get as good as he is. How much practice? Hours. Hundreds of hours. Thousands of hours. More hours than a human being probably should spend playing video games, but nonetheless, many, many hours.
Don't we already know this, though? We look at our Olympic athletes, and we know they've practiced for three or four or more hours a day, every day, for several years, just to get where they are. We look at successful musicians, and same thing -- three or four hours a day, every day. There's a common idea going around now that it takes 10,000 hours of doing something to become expert at it -- do the math, and several hours a day, every day, for five or six years gives you those hours. Even with language development, by the time a child is four or five years old, they're considered, for all intents and purposes, fluent in their native language ... and if you add up the hours they've been speaking (because, let's face it, we all talk a heck of a lot more than we do pretty much anything else in our lives), it comes out right around 10,000.
But then what about those of us who create? How often do we make one feeble stab at a project, have it fall flat, so we abandon it? For some reason, we take that 10,000-hour thing and flush it down the toilet when it comes to the act of creation. Why should we get a pass, though? Why should we be any different?
I look at my first published piece, which got accepted back in 2006. By that time, I'd been composing for several years. I actually "wrote" my first piano piece back in junior high school, probably around 1990. I did composing and arranging off and on all through high school, including some pieces that got played by my high school orchestra (and one that eventually scored me a date with the woman who was to become my wife). I studied music in college, composing pieces that got played (though never in concert) by the MIT Symphony, Wind Ensemble, and a lot of really good small ensembles that passed through our school. I helped a friend found a Composer's Ensemble for a couple of years at MIT, where other composers would gather, and we'd write for the instruments we had on hand, just to hone our composing skills.
After college, I kept composing, though my focus shifted from the avant garde things we were encouraged to write in college to more tonal pieces. I entered contests, I wrote for our groups at church, I wrote for myself ... anything to keep my hand in the game. By the time I got published in 2006, I'd been composing for at least 16 years. Did I do it 3 or 4 hours a day, every day? No, but by the time I got accepted, I probably had a good 4,000 or 5,000 hours under my belt.
The good news is that, for a creative, practice is a loose term. A writer who writes in a diary daily is getting writing practice, even when her main thrust is writing young adult thrillers. The painter who doodles while talking on the phone is getting practice. As I look back, I can even see that the hours I spent in elementary school and early junior high, playing around on the piano, exploring the circle of fifths, playing with chords and their sounds ... all of that was a sort of practice that didn't involve me sitting down at a computer and announcing to the world, "I am composing now!"
So before you label an attempt at a creation a failure, ask yourself this: is it really a failure, or am I just getting in more practice on my road to becoming an expert? Keep up the practice, and success can't help but find you.
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