All right, things are starting to come together. We’ve figured out what makes deliberate practice different from the normal author’s path. We’ve started analyzing the work of expert writers and learned how we improve skills through mental representations. We have a blank sheet of paper or a new Word document, and we’re ready to practice.
Now what?
Unlike well-established fields like sports or music, there are no widely accepted practice techniques for writing. That means it’s up to us to figure out what works, and a major part of this blog will be testing different exercises and posting the results.
Fortunately, we don’t have to start entirely from scratch. Anders Ericsson’s research has identified three elements that are critical for any practice to be effective. He incorporated them into deliberate practice, and says:
- Deliberate practice focuses on specific goals and develops lesson plans to reach them bit by bit.
- Deliberate practice pushes you beyond your current abilities.
- Deliberate practice takes focus.
Dr. Ericsson details why these elements are important in chapter 2 of Peak, so if you want the full scientific explanation I’d recommend starting there. But for now, the short and simple version is this: the human brain is highly adaptive and reacts to the pressures placed on it. To improve a skill, you need to pressure your brain enough that it has to change to accommodate the new strain.
Why do you need specific goals? Because without a goal you’re not driving your brain to adjust in any particular way. The practice has to push beyond your current abilities because over time your brain gets used to performing at a certain level. To keep improving you have to break out of the plateau. Finally, if you’re not really focusing on the task at hand, your brain is not under pressure and won’t need to make adjustments.
So with these three elements in mind, what are we actually going to do to practice? We’ll start by looking at a case where a man succeeded in becoming a great writer through practice: the story of Benjamin Franklin.
Benjamin Franklin Learns to Write:
Anders Ericsson explains how Benjamin Franklin learned to write starting on page 155 of Peak. But Benjamin Franklin himself tells the story in chapter 2 of his autobiography, which happens to be available for free online. Since we all have access to the source material, I’ll be working from the autobiography.
The story starts like this. Franklin bought a copy of the Spectator, a London journal of satirical and political essays. After reading it, he says,
I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try’d to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.
This is the first practice technique I’ll try, which for the sake of convenience I’m calling the Hints Exercise. When I find a particularly excellent scene, description, conversation, or any other piece of a story, I’ll write myself short notes about each part of it. Then, after a few days without looking at my notes, I’ll use them to try to recreate what I studied. When I’m finished I’ll compare my work to the original and make corrections as needed.
Benjamin Franklin used the hints exercise to improve his writing technique, but I’m also going to try using it for studying plot. Trying to rewrite an entire story would be absurdly time consuming, so I’ll start by writing a summary the book or movie that I want to study, making sure to include all the key events in the plot. I’ll write my hints based on the summary, and after a few days I’ll use the hints to reconstruct the plotline. I’ll compare my reconstruction to my summary, make any corrections, and repeat.
As a side note, you may notice that Benjamin Franklin’s approach includes elements of deliberate practice beyond the three we’re looking at in this post. Specifically, he found experts to emulate, spent time analyzing what made those experts successful, and worked to improve specific areas of weakness. While a lot of the terminology surrounding deliberate practice is fairly new, I find it reassuring that Franklin was applying the core ideas as far back as the 1700’s.
Back to the text:
I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts.
This is the second practice technique I’ll use, which I’m calling the Structure Exercise. Just like Franklin says, I’ll jumble up the notes I took for the hints exercise, then try to put them back in order. If I get the order wrong, I’ll note the mistakes and keep trying until I can successfully recreate the structure of the original work.
This technique may seem like simple memorization, and some people may be tempted to skip it under the assumption that they can always just refer back to their notes. For example, after identifying the 14 key events in a good romance plot, they could simply keep their notes handy while writing and make sure their story hits the events in the right order.
I think this would be a major mistake. Our goal is not simply to mimic the structure of great writing, it’s to understand why that structure helped make the writing great. Writing is fundamentally about communicating ideas to another human being, and a critical part of that is organizing our thoughts in a way that’s easy to understand. By internalizing the writing and plot structures used by many different authors we’ll learn how successful writers organize their work. Over time, we’ll figure out what parts of the structures are universal and what are simply a matter of taste. When we know that, we’re well on the way to mastery.
One More Technique:
Along with Franklin’s techniques I’m going to try one other exercise. It is:
The Storyboarding Exercise: After I’ve analyzed a number of different stories that all follow the same general arc (for example, a series of mysteries) I’ll outline their overall structure and write a number of story summaries which all adhere to it. I’ll write these summaries rapidly and in a fairly short period – say, one a day for a month. The goal of the exercise is threefold: to brainstorm many different story ideas, to drive home a successful story structure, and to force myself to create entire plotlines rather than just collections of scenes.
The storyboards can vary tremendously in characters, setting, and so on, as long as they follow the outline. Note: I’m not advocating writing a book that simply copies the events in other novels. Most likely none of these storyboards would be interesting as full length novels without a number of changes to pull them away from pure formula. Instead, my goal is to master the formulas and keep them as baselines – building blocks I can work from later while creating something unique.
From Franklin to Deliberate Practice:
Now that I’ve laid out the 3 practice techniques I’ll be starting with – the Hints, Structure, and Storyboarding exercises – let’s take a moment to make sure they have the three elements of deliberate practice I mentioned at the beginning of this post. As a reminder, the elements are:
- Deliberate practice focuses on specific goals and develops lesson plans to reach them bit by bit.
- Deliberate practice pushes you beyond your current abilities.
- Deliberate practice takes focus.
The hints exercise has all three in spades. The specific goal is clear: to imitate the writing or plotline that I’m studying, and the constant comparisons with an original work should make it easy to track incremental improvements. So long as the writer I’m studying is better than I am (hardly difficult at this point), the exercise will by definition push me past my current abilities. Finally, striving to match the skill of a better writer will almost certainly take all my focus.
For the structure exercise, I think this type of practice will be most useful when I’m first starting to study how great writers organize their work. It has a clear goal and takes focus, but as I memorize the common patterns it will probably stop regularly pushing me beyond my current abilities. But by then it will have served its purpose, and I’ll bring it back out any time I encounter a particularly unique piece of storytelling.
Finally, the storyboarding exercise. This exercise has a specific goal: learning to create many different stories while following a successful outline, and I should be able to tell if I’m improving over time simply by how hard it is to come up with a new story each day. If it gets easier over time – and the quality of the story summaries doesn’t noticeably decrease – it’s a good indication I’m getting better. There may come a day when the exercise no longer takes much focus or pushes me beyond my current abilities, but if I’m truly coming up with a unique story for each iteration, I suspect that time is a long ways off.
As I discover or create practice techniques that meet the requirements for deliberate practice I’ll try them out and post the results. But with just these three exercises I’ve got a huge amount of work to do, so I’m not in any hurry. I’m aiming to start regular writing practice in the next few weeks, but before that there’s still two more parts of deliberate practice that we need to discuss. The next post will focus on how we’ll get feedback. See you then.
