We can probably agree, in general, that the above statement is correct. You start off rubbish, you practice for untold squillions of hours, you eventually get good. You're very unlikely to get good if you skip the boring, repetative middle part (anyone who instantly became brilliant at anything is free to ignore this blog post).
The more I stop to think about it however, the more I'm convinced it's not completely accurate, and the problem lies with the word 'perfect'. Can you really obtain perfection just through diligent practice?
An example: I can't sing. Well, I can sing privately in the car or over-enthusiastically at karaoke, but no one is ever going to pay to hear the sound of my voice. Now, if I practiced every single day; if I took lessons and learned techniques and really focused my mind... in a few years I could probably be competent. BUT... competent is a long way from perfect, isn't it? No matter how much time and effort I put into singing, I'm never going to star in Les Mis or get to the final round of X-Factor.
See, this is an issue I'm having about my writing. I would classify myself as a competent writer. I've completed about twenty novels, some of which are readable. I write every day. I take every available (affordable) course I can. I ask advice from anyone who'll tolerate my questions. I understand the basics of structure and plotting and why my characters shouldn't be so bloody passive all the time. I know how to use the word 'ameliorate'. I'm fairly sure I know what a gerund is.
BUT... competent is a long way from perfect.
If writing is a scale from 1 to 10, where 10 is Neil Gaiman and 1 is a drunk horse hitting the keys with its face, I'm probably... ehhhhh... realistically about a 6. Maybe a 7 on the best day of my life.
I'm definitely better than I was when I first started writing, at age 14, with a screenplay about killer mutated gorse bushes (it was called A Real Mutated One and was an unhealthy blend of The Thing and Reservoir Dogs, as far as I recall). I'm also pretty sure I'm a better writer than I was five years ago. A year ago? That I'm not so sure about.
I'm not convinced I'm still improving as a writer. I think I may have reached a plateau. And that's irksome, because I would quite like to be brilliant.
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing intrinsically bad about competence. I'm a competent cook and that's fine--I have no ambitions above feeding my family every day. There is no aspiration for me to become a professional cook or bake a meringue on live television or learn what the hell a bain marie is. A decent level of competence is both admirable and worth working hard for.
But to upgrade from a 6 to a 10... is that even possible? Or does every perfect-10 writer in the world have some spark of genius that simply can't be replicated by wishing really-really hard? Not everyone who learns the guitar has the potential to be Jimi Hendrix. By their very nature, perfect-10s are a rare, singular event, because if everyone was special then no one would be.
This is what I'm currently fretting about. Am I happy to be competent in my writing? And if not, is there anything I can do about it? Hard work is a significant part of the process, sure, but I suspect the perfect-10s also have a blending of genius, luck, and good timing. Maybe lazy geniuses never reach their full potential, but equally, hard-working competents without that indefinable flair may never become geniuses. Is that true?
I think I have to decide what I want to aim for, what I can realistically achieve, and how I intend to get there. Hmm.
