Deliberate Practice: A New Approach to Writing

Deliberate practice is the brainchild of Dr. Anders Ericsson, a researcher and psychologist out of Florida State University. His research focuses on what makes experts so good at what they do,  and more importantly for us, finding the best techniques for those looking to improve.  He published a book about his findings called Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, and in it he outlines an approach to practice that his research has found is the most effective way for any person to improve any skill. He calls this technique deliberate practice.

The book is an invaluable resource that I’m going to reference throughout the blog. If you have even a slight interest in improving your skill at anything, go buy it. This is what my copy looks like:

 

 

So what makes deliberate practice different from the traditional author’s path? Well, let’s start by laying out how I previously tried to improve my writing. Based on advice I received, books on writing, and my understanding of how successful authors had started out, my former approach looked something like this:

1. Start by reading a lot. Between reading and my normal education, I expected to learn the basics of grammar, vocabulary, story structure, and so on.
2. Begin writing something. I was told not to worry if it’s bad, just get the words on paper.
3. Do some editing. I did as much editing as I could on my own, then sent my work for a round or two through friends and family. A writer’s circle would have been helpful, but I never found one I wanted to join.
4. Based on their feedback, edit some more. I repeated steps 3 and 4 until I felt like the story was finished . . . or at least wasn’t going to get any better.
5. Submit the story to magazines, publishers, or agents. I’d been warned that rejections are common, so I gritted my teeth and submitted my work as broadly as possible.
6. Get rejection letters. Once it was clear no one was interested, I started on a new project.

This approach has a few components of deliberate practice (specifically getting feedback) but overall it’s what Dr. Ericsson calls ‘naive practice.’ Naive practice can be summed up as doing the same thing over and over and hoping that brute repetition will eventually lead to improvement.

But here’s the problem: naive practice doesn’t work. Dr. Ericsson’s most compelling example of this is on page 131 of Peak. It goes something like this: who do you think generally has better patient outcomes? Physicians with 5 years of experience, or physicians with 20 years of experience?

If naive practice worked, a physician with 20 years of experience should be vastly more successful than a physician with just 5. But even after controlling for variables like outdated knowledge or old techniques, the data showed just the opposite. If anything, the 20 year physician has slightly worse patient outcomes. Far from improving the doctor’s overall competence, rote practice of the same tasks seems to slightly decrease effectiveness over time. And this is not a unique case. Dr. Ericsson addresses naive practice thoroughly in Peak and his results are conclusive: repetition alone will not make us better writers.

So, what does work? Dr. Ericsson has spent decades trying to answer that question, and the end result is deliberate practice. The techniques that define deliberate practice are not necessarily new or novel; many fields, particularly highly developed ones like sports, music, or chess, have used some or all of them for centuries. But Dr. Ericsson’s work has identified and organized these best practices, and we now have the chance to apply them to tasks outside of these highly developed fields – like writing.

If you want the full list of what makes deliberate practice head to page 99 of Peak. These were my key takeaways:

• Deliberate practice is based on expert performers of the desired skill. Rather than trying to learn a skill from scratch, deliberate practice begins by asking who the best performers are in a given field, then finding out what makes them so good. Once you know that, you can design practice techniques that build towards a clear goal.
• Deliberate practice builds strong mental representations. Mental representations are a huge part of Dr. Ericsson’s work and I’ll go into more detail about them in a future post. For now, the key takeaway is that experts must develop a detailed understanding of the correct way to do each individual element their skill. For example, to play a song a violinist must have a clear mental representation of how the song is supposed to sound, along with mental representations of how to hold the instrument, how much pressure to apply with the bow, and each of the movements that will make the instrument produce the desired notes. The better the violinist’s mental representations are, the better they will play.
• Deliberate practice focuses on specific goals and develops lesson plans to reach them bit by bit. Vaguely trying to ‘get better’ isn’t helpful. Deliberate practice breaks a skill into its component pieces, then focuses on making incremental improvements to areas of weakness.
• Deliberate practice pushes you beyond your current abilities. Practicing a skill at a level you’re comfortable with does not lead to improvement no matter how much time you spend on it. If you’re going to get better, the practice needs to push you outside your comfort zone.
• Deliberate practice takes focus. Working on skills beyond your current abilities takes intense focus and effort. If you’re not giving the practice your full attention it’s very unlikely that you’ll improve. The effort required often means that deliberate practice is not very fun.
• Feedback is critical. You need some way of measuring if your practice techniques are working. A teacher is usually the best option, since they can both identify weaknesses and recommend ways to improve. However, if one isn’t available you can use things like scores, quizzes, or comparisons to expert performers to determine if you’re getting better.
• Finally, you must have the discipline to commit to practice long-term. Truly mastering a skill takes tens of thousands of hours, so developing the discipline to keep at it month after month, year after year, is just as important as knowing the right ways to practice.

The differences between deliberate practice and my past approach are pretty stark. When I started writing I didn’t spend any time trying to understand what makes some writing better than others or why I enjoyed the work of my favorite authors. Without that, I had no plan for how to improve. I just wrote a lot and relied on feedback from readers. Some of that feedback was excellent, but it’s not enough to make up for total lack of planning. Without knowing what I needed to improve or how to improve it, forward progress was mostly just luck. Most damning of all, I worked in fits and starts, with my longest project lasting about a year. Working steadily for a year isn’t bad, but the several months before and after it where I did next to no writing were not.

So I’ve recognized there’s a problem, and now it’s time to fix it. But there’s still a major hurdle, and it’s that there aren’t well established practice techniques for writing. The best ways to practice the violin have been developed and refined over several hundred years, but bringing deliberate practice to writing is going to take some experimentation. This blog is a lab where we’ll figure out what works and start crafting the tools we need to practice writing correctly. The next 5 blog posts will more detail on each part of deliberate practice, and after that I’ll start applying the techniques to my own work and post the results. You can find a full list of my posts on deliberate practice here.

So with that, step one is to identify the expert performers I want to emulate and analyze what makes them so good. You can read on in Analyzing the Experts.