I read an interview in the New Yorker recently with Mikaela Shiffrin, one of the world’s leading slalom skiers, in which she talked about how little time she actually spends on the slopes. After accounting for the hours spent travelling between training runs, kitting out, warming up and sitting on chairlifts, even the most dedicated skier will struggle to get more than seven minutes skiing out of a training day. Contrary to the famous Malcolm Gladwell assertion that success requires 10,000 hours of practice, Shiffrin considers it the height of dedication to be achieving 11 hours of skiing over the course of a year.
In many ways, I like to think of myself as an Olympic medal-winning skier. Sometimes, when people ask how long it takes to write a novel, I wonder what they really want to hear. How long does it take to get to the bottom of the ski run? How much of that seven years was spent actually writing the actual text that went into the actual finished novel? In common with most people who work from home – and have more than one job, and have children in their lives – the mechanics of when and where I’m actually sitting at a desk doing work are complex and inconsistent. But even taking that into account, the work that actually happens at a desk is not always time spent actually writing. There are other things that happen.
(Fun fact: I have never been asked how I juggle writing and fatherhood. I’m not complaining; it’s nobody’s business, and nothing to do with writing. But I wonder what assumptions lie behind the question of juggling writing and motherhood coming up so regularly?)
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