Blaize Clement | THE JOURNEY FROM THERE TO HERE

With my fifth mystery, RAINING CAT SITTERS AND DOGS (St. Martins Minotaur), having just hit the bookstores, and my fourth mystery, CAT SITTER ON A HOT TIN ROOF, a nominee for the 2009 Mary Higgins Clark Award, I sometimes catch myself looking back in some wonder at how I got to this point.

I've been a writer almost as long as I've been a reader. I wrote because I had to write, the same way I had to breathe. But I also had to make a living, so while I wrote short stories, essays, plays, non-fiction, and books "ghosted" under other people's names, I never considered writing as a serious career. My career was being a psychologist, which allowed me the freedom to write whatever I wanted to write. If an essay or a story found a publishing home, that was fine. If it didn't, that was fine too. Not having to rely on writing to pay the rent, I could explore ideas, try out different voices, spread my wings as widely as I wanted. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was putting in an apprenticeship that would one day be vital to a new career.

I read somewhere that to become an expert at anything, you have to spend ten thousand hours practicing it. At the end of ten thousand hours, presto, you're an expert. I thought that was outlandish until I did the math. Assuming that an "expert" writer is a published writer, to become published is to write five hours a day every day for about five and a half years. Or two hours a day for about sixteen years. That includes childhood writing, school essays, and all those aborted novels that never got finished, so it really isn't such a huge amount of writing after all. Even those literary wunderkinds barely out of their teens have been scribbling for years.

While my experience as a psychotherapist gave me an intimate look into the ways human beings let love or hatred or fear lead them into dark places of the soul - an invaluable asset for a mystery writer - it was ten thousand hours of exploring different genres and voices that led to a groove that fits my personality and my experience and my sense of humor. So to all those who are still in the apprenticeship stage of writing, value every moment you spend writing. Celebrate every manuscript that didn't work, rejoice at every rejection slip, respect every banal essay, and every trite poem you write. Every word you write makes you an expert at your craft and takes you closer to fulfilling your ten thousand hours of required practice. My best to you,

Blaize

www.BlaizeClement.com. "Kitty Litter" blog: http://www.DixieHemingway.wordpress.com