A good friend of mine has a friend who is a much-celebrated author of literary fiction; he’s won more than one important literary prize. Nice guy—I’ve met him. Humble, funny, interesting, smart. Teaches college.

And he’s got a little “secret”: for several years before he published his “first” novel and won an award and got lots of attention, he wrote middle-grade fiction under a pseudonym to keep the bills paid. Lots of it, apparently. For a big New York publisher.

I was intrigued. Also, I love middle-grade fiction. I wanted to check it out, but was informed that our mutual friend would prefer not to reveal the specifics.

“Really?”

OK, you can call me naïve, but this had never crossed my mind (it was some years ago). Although I do get it, now. There are a lot of snobs in this business who might think differently of him, and he wants to be known as the guy who won the big prize, not the guy who wrote thirty books for kids. (That children’s books tend to be thought of as somehow less is another post for another time. Because they’re decidedly not.)

But just think of all the great experience he got! He learned to work with an editor, he learned from that editor: things like pacing and characterization and story. All that … and he got paid for it too. It was great practice.

That practice made a dent in his ten thousand hours as well. You know the Ten Thousand Hour Rule, right? Coined by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, it’s the theory that, assuming aptitude, it takes a lot of deliberate, dedicated practice to excel at complex tasks—like neurosurgery, musicianship, and writing novels. (You can find alternatives and refinements about the rule, but I’m tellin’ ya, kids, writers need to practice before they publish.)

This is an interesting idea, I think—the work you do before you become a major league writer. Take Kate Atkinson, whose Life After Life was one of my favorite books in 2013. In this review/retrospective in the New York Times, I was delighted to read,

It was some years after college that she began to write professionally. A single mother with two young children, she earned money various ways, including as a tutor at [University of] Dundee and a home aide for elderly people …. She formed a “housework cooperative” with some friends and wrote short stories “about love, romance, adoption” for women’s magazines. “It taught me to write,” she said. “You have to have everything—character, plot, resolution, a beginning, middle and end. You have to have your own voice. You learn how to turn a story around on a sixpence.”

And then her first published novel (Behind the Scenes at the Museum) won the 1995 Whitbread Prize.

Coincidence? I think not.

I don’t care enough to spend the time to find out if she used her real name on those stories, but Atkinson’s past is transparent enough: that she worked as a chambermaid in college, for example, and didn’t pass the oral exam for her PhD are well-known facts.

Not everyone wants to reveal all, though. In a publicist’s dream of a feature in Entertainment Weekly (my print edition of the 26 December 2014 issue), Katherine Heiny is interviewed in advance of the February release of her collection of short stories, Single, Carefree, Mellow. It comes out that she wrote series YA for five years.

I published a story in Seventeen that had a very young protagonist, and I got an offer to write YA books. … In the beginning, they wanted me to write the 25th book in a series. … They start you way back in a series that already has a following so that if you screw it up, you already have a die-hard fan base. Then they move you up so you’re writing books that are in the first 10, and then they give you your own series.

“It was fun,” she says, but when pressed to name the series, she replies, “I don’t want to—I’d be embarrassed.” (A search on Amazon reveals nothing, so she also used a pseudonym.)

Again, I get it. I don’t need to know. (So many books, so little time.) But the lesson for you, friends, is that each of these authors learned the writing craft through writing practice. Each is a critically acclaimed, published author—and that’s your goal too. The important thing is not “who” you were when you started, but who you are when you arrive.

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