A few weeks so ago, I watched two college teams play for the right to go to the NCAA tournament.  One team, down twenty points at halftime, rallied behind the sensational play of a single star and pulled out the victory by one point in the last seconds.  That was the way television commentators and the print media reported it.  I saw it very differently. One of the starting guards for the losing team missed seven out of twelve free throws, two of them in the last fifteen seconds.  This wasn’t a fluke, a bad day for that player – he had a year-long 40% free throw success percentage.  And just how many games in the NCAA tournament have been lost by “bad” free throw shooting?  Or won by good free throw shooting?  More than just a handful.

Good free-throw shooting is clearly important to basketball success.  Just look at the NBA.  While the free-throw shooting average for NCAA players is 69%, this year’s NBA average is 77%, and 98% of NBA starters have free throw percentages above 60%, with 75% of those starters making more than three-quarters of their free throws.

To my mind, this is a good example of what lies behind excellence – the ability to master even the most boring aspect of one’s profession. Another point associated with this is that simply knowing what a free throw is and when it is employed isn’t the same as being able to do it.  It requires practice – lots of practice. Shooting free throws day after day and improving technique is not exciting; it’s boring.  But the fact that there are very, very few poor free-throw shooters in the NBA is a good indication that mastery of the boring pays off.

The same is true in writing.  Learning grammar and even spelling [because spell-checkers don’t catch everything, by any means] is also boring and time consuming, and there are some writers who are, shall I say, slightly grammatically challenged, but most writers know their grammar.  They have to, because editors usually don’t have the time or the interest in cleaning up bad writing.  It also gets boring to proofread page after page of what you’ve written, from the original manuscript, the copy-edited manuscript, the hardcover galleys, the paperback galleys, and so on… but it’s necessary.

Learning how to fly, which most people believe is exciting, consists of a great deal of boredom, from learning to follow checklists to the absolute letter, to practicing and practicing landings, take-offs, and emergency procedures hour after hour, day after day until they’re second nature.  All that practice is tedious… and absolutely necessary.

My opera director wife is having greater difficulty with each year in getting students to memorize their lines and music – because it’s boring – but you can’t sing opera or musical theatre if you don’t know your music and lines.

I could go on and on, detailing the necessary “boring” requirements of occupation after occupation, but the point behind all this is that our media, our educational system, and all too many parents have instilled a message that learning needs to be interesting and fun, and that there’s something wrong with the learning climate if the students lose interest.  Students have always lost interest.  We’re genetically primed to react to the “new” because it was once a survival requirement.  But the problem today is that the skills required to succeed in any even moderately complex society require mastery of the basics, i.e., boring skills, or sub-skills, before one can get into the really interesting aspects of work.  Again, merely being able to look something up isn’t the same as knowing it, understanding what it means, and being able to do it, time after time without thinking about it and without having to look it up repeatedly.

And the emphasis on fun and making it interesting is obscuring the need for fundamental mastery of skills, and shortchanging all too many young people.

Last week, in my semi-masochistic reading of reviews, I came across a review of The Magic of Recluce that really jarred me.  It wasn’t that the review was bad, or even a rave.  The reviewer noted the strengths of the book and some areas she thought weak, or at least that felt rough to her.  What jarred me were the words and the references which compared it to books that had been published years afterward, as if The Magic of Recluce happened to be copying books that actually appeared after it.  Now, this may have been as much my impression as what the reviewer meant, but it struck a chord – off-key – in my mind because I’ve seen more than a few reviews, especially in recent years, that note that The Magic of Recluce was good, decent… or whatever, but not as original as [fill in the blank].

Now… I’m not about to get into comparative “quality” — not in this blog, at least, but I have to admit that the “not so original” comment, when comparing Recluce to books published later, concerns me.  At the time the book was published, almost all the quotes and reviews noted its originality.  That it seems less “original” now to newer and often younger readers is not because it is less original, but because there are far more books out with differing magic systems.  Brandon Sanderson, for example, has developed more than a few such systems, but all of them came well after my systems in Recluce, Erde, and Corus, and Brandon has publicly noted that he read my work well before he was a published author.

The word “original” derives from “origin,” i.e., the beginning, with the secondary definition that it is not a copy or a duplicate of other work.  In that sense, Tolkien’s work and mine are both original, because our systems and the sources from which we drew are substantially different.  Tolkien drew from linguistics and the greater and lesser Eddas, and, probably through his Inking connections with C.S. Lewis, slightly from Wagner.  I developed my magic system from a basis of physics.  Those are the “origins.”

The other sense of “original” is that signifying preceding that which follows, and in that sense, my work is less original than that of Tolkien, but more “original” than that of Sanderson or others who published later, for two reasons.  First, I wrote it earlier that did those who followed me, and second, I developed magic systems unlike any others [although the Spellsong Cycle magic has similarities to Alan Dean Foster’s Spellsinger, but a fundamentally different technical concept].

There’s also a difference between “original” and “unique.”  While it is quite possible for an original work not to be unique, a truly unique work must be original, although it can be derivative.

Inn any case, my concerns are nothing compared to those raised by the reader review I once read that said that Tolkien’s work was “sort of neat,” even if he did rip off a lot from Terry Brooks.

The other day I received an email from a faithful reader who noted that he had stopped reading The Soprano Sorceress because the song magic was “too easy.” Over the years I’ve received other comments along the lines that all she had to do was open her mouth and sing.

Right. Except that under the magic system in Erde, the song had to be perfectly on pitch and in key; the words had to specify what had to be accomplished; and the accompaniment had to match. In the opening of that book, a sorcerer destroyed a violinist whose accompaniment was imperfect — because it could have threatened his life. Comparatively few professional singers, except classically trained opera singers, can maintain such perfection in a live performance. And some of those don’t have the best diction — yet clear diction would be vital in song spell-casting. Now… try it in the middle of a battle or when your life is under immediate threat.

I bring this up because there are certain skills in any society, but particularly in our society, that almost everyone thinks they can do. Most people believe they can sing, or write, or paint almost as well as the professionals, and almost all of them think they can certainly critique such with great validity.

I’m sorry. Most people have a far higher opinion of their skills than can be objectively confirmed — and that’s likely an understatement. Even in noted music conservatories, only a minority of graduates are good enough, talented enough, and dedicated enough to sing professionally. The same is true of noted writing programs or established art programs. For that matter, comparatively few graduates of noted business schools ever make it to the top levels of business organizations or corporations.

A similar attitude pervades our view of sports. Tens of millions of American men identity with sports and criticize and second-guess athletic professionals whose skills they could never match under pressures they can only vaguely comprehend. Monday morning quarterbacking used to be a truly derogatory term, enough so that its use tended to stop someone cold. Now it’s almost jocular, and everyone’s an expert in everything.

Is all this because our media makes everything look easy? Because the media only concentrate on the handful of individuals in the arts, athletics, and professions who are skilled, dedicated, and talented enough to make it look “easy.” Or is it because our society has decided to tell students that they’re wonderful, or have “special” talents when they’re failing?

The bottom line is that doing anything well is not “easy,” no matter how effortless it looks, especially when one of the talents of the best is to make that accomplishment look effortless… and that usually means that only those who truly understand that skill really know what it took to make it look easy or effortless.

The Pew Research Center recently reported that among 19-28 year-olds, blogging activity dropped from close to thirty percent in December 2007 to around fifteen percent by the end of 2009, while the number of teenagers who blogged continues to decline. Those under thirty now focus primarily on Facebook and Twitter. On the other hand, blogging has increased among adults over thirty by close to forty percent in the last three years, although the 11% of those who do blog is still below the 15% level of the 19-29 age group. Based on current trends, that gap will close significantly over the next few years.

These data scarcely surprise me. After all, once you’ve blurted out, “Here I am,” and explained who you are, maintaining a blog with any form of regularity takes, thought, insight, and dedicated work, none of which are exactly traits encouraged in our young people today, despite the lip service paid to them. And, after all, while it can be done, it’s hard to fully expose one’s lack of insight and shallowness when one is limited to the 140 characters of a Twitter message, and since Facebook is about “connecting” and posturing, massive thought and insight are not required.

There is a deeper problem demonstrated by these trends — that technology is being used once more to exploit the innate tendency of the young to focus on speed and fad — or “hipness” [or whatever term signifies being cool and belonging]. All too many young adults are functionally damaged in their inability to concentrate and to focus on any form of sustained task. Their low boredom threshold, combined with a socially instilled sense that learning should always be interesting and tailored precisely to them, makes workplace learning difficult, if not impossible, for far too many of them, and makes them want to be promoted to the next position as soon as possible.

As Ursula Burns, the President and CEO of Xerox, recently noted, however, this urge for promotion as soon as one has learned the basics of a job is horribly counterproductive for the employer… as well as for the employee. The young employee wants to move on as soon as he or she has learned the job. If businesses acquiesce in this, they’ll always be training people, and they’ll never be able to take advantage of the skills people have learned, because once they’ve learned the job, they’re gone from that position, either promoted or departed to another organization in search of advancement. It also means that those who follow such a path never fully learn, and never truly refine and improve those skills.

This sort of impatience has always existed among the young, and it’s definitely not unique to the current generations. What is unique, unfortunately, is the degree to which society and technology are embracing and enabling what is, over time, effectively an anti-social and societally fragmenting tendency.

Obviously, not all members of the younger generation follow these trends and patterns, but from what I’ve learned from my fairly widespread net of acquaintances in higher education across the nation, a majority of college students, perhaps a sizable majority, are in fact addicted to what I’d call, for lack of a better term, “speed-tech superficiality,” and that’s going to make the next few decades interesting indeed.

Several of the comments in the blogsphere during the Macmillan-Amazon dust-up focused on the point I and others had raised about the fact that, depending on the publisher, from thirty to sixty percent of all books lost money and that those losses were made up by the better-selling books. A number of commenters to various blogs essentially protested that publishers shouldn’t be “subsidizing” books that couldn’t carry their own weight, so to speak. At the time, I didn’t clarify this misconception, but it nagged at me.

So… almost NO publishers print books that they know will lose money. The plain fact of the matter is that when a publisher prints a book, it is usually with the expectation that it will at least break even, or come close. At times, publishers know a book will be borderline, because the author is new, but they publish the book in the hopes of introducing an author whose later books, they believe, will sell more. While the statistics show that 30%-60% of books lose money, the key point is that the publishers don’t know in advance which books will lose money. Yes, they do know that it’s unlikely that, for example, a Wheel of Time or a Recluce book will lose money, but no publisher has enough guaranteed best-sellers to fill out their printing schedule. Likewise, they really don’t know who will become a guaranteed best-seller. Just look at how many publishers turned down Harry Potter. Certainly, no editors ever thought that the Recluce books would sell as well or for as long as they have. Not to mention the fact that there are authors whose books were at the top of The New York Times bestseller lists whose later books were anything but bestsellers. The bottom line is simple: Publishers do not generally choose to print books that they know will lose money just to subsidize a given book or author. They try to print good-selling books, and they aren’t always successful.

Last week, Bowker released sales figures for the book publishing industry that revealed that only two percent of all book sales in 2009 were of e-books, while 35% were of trade paperbacks, 35% were hardcovers, and 21% were mass market paperbacks. Interestingly enough, though, while chain bookstores sold 27% of all books, e-commerce sites, such as Amazon and BarnesandNoble.com, sold 20% of all titles, including hardcovers, trade paperbacks, and mass market paperbacks. People talk about how fast matters can change, but even “fast” takes time. Jeff Bezos started Amazon in 1994. Today, based on the Bowker figures, Amazon probably accounts for between nine and fourteen percent of all U.S. book sales, but that’s after sixteen years of high growth. A study by Nielsen [the BookScan folks] also revealed that forty percent of all readers would not consider e-books under any circumstances. To me, those figures suggest that, while e-books may indeed be the wave of the future, the industry isn’t going to be doing big-time surfing on it for many years to come.

Total book sales were down about three percent last year, but fiction sales were up seven percent. The overall decline was linked to a decrease in sales of adult nonfiction. That indicates there was definitely an increased market for escapism in 2009.

And one last thought… in 1996, Amazon was still struggling, and there was a question as to whether it would really pull through — and then Jeff Bezos introduced the reader reviews, and Amazon never looked back. Because readers could offer their own views… they bought more books from Amazon. Do so many people feel so marginalized that being able to post comments changes their entire buying habits? The other downside to reader reviews is that the increasingly wide usage of the practice — from student evaluations to Amazon reviews — reinforces the idea that all opinions are of equal value… and they’re not, except in the mind of the opinion-giver. Some reader reviews are good, thoughtful, and logical. Most are less than that.

So, in yet another area, good marketing has quietly undermined product excellence.