“It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.”
― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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The Games of the Masters
Let’s say that you wanted to become a great chess player. How would you go about it? The obvious answer is by playing a lot of chess, but as you already know if you’ve read the previous post, that answer is wrong. As Anders Ericsson explains on page 56 of Peak:
“Anyone who is serious about developing skills on the chessboard will do it mainly by spending countless hours studying games played by the masters. You analyze a position in depth, predicting the next move, and if you get it wrong, you go back and figure out what you missed. Research has shown that the amount of time spent in this sort of analysis – not the amount of time spent playing chess with others – is the single most important predictor of a chess player’s ability.”
Before I learned about deliberate practice, I felt a strong stigma for studying another author’s writing. The thought of trying to emulate other people’s work smacked to me of plagiarism and a lack of creativity. I also didn’t terribly enjoy the literature study I did in school, so instead I just read what I liked and hoped I would somehow learn through osmosis.
That was a mistake. It’s obviously important not to rip off other people’s work, but there’s a big difference between study and theft. I believe there are . . . if not rules, at least patterns in what readers enjoy. If that’s correct, it means there’s a huge amount to learn through the focused study of excellent stories. Depending on how similar practicing writing is to practicing chess, this study might be even more important than spending time writing.
Learning to Study
So, analyzing stories. That means something like English class, right? Looking for symbolism, memorizing sonnets and all that?
Nope. That’s not what we’re doing here.
I like thinking about writing not as art, but as a trade. Our goal is to become master craftsmen, and just like apprentice electricians, plumbers, or mechanics, we need to learn the tools of our trade and how best to apply them. Any artistic flare is strictly secondary to doing a good job. So once we’ve found a story we want to study, our analysis should start with just one question: why is this story good?
There are many different analytic techniques, but in the name of simplicity I’m going to start by only looking at three things:
- What happened?
- Is it important?
- Why did the author do it?
With this basic analytical tool, I’m going to study two areas:
- The structure of the story. This includes what events happen in what order, how characters are developed, the themes the story explores, and so on.
- The author’s writing. This means dialogue, descriptions, word choice, vocabulary, and how the words appear on the page.
That’s it. Three questions applied to two areas. I might change or improve these later, but they already leave us with a huge amount to learn.
Let’s apply these to an example, something we’ll all know. How about . . . the first Star Wars film, A New Hope. If we’re looking at the structure, we see that the film opens with “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” then presents a giant block of text giving background information on the universe.
Awesome. We have a thing that happened. Now, is it important? (When analyzing story structure, this could also be rephrased as, “Would the story have worked without it?”)
Possibly. That might sound like a wishy-washy answer, but bear with me for a second. Until I’ve built a solid foundation by analyzing a number of different stories, I can’t yet say how important that particular introduction is. Maybe it’s critical to do some worldbuilding right at the beginning to start getting the audience invested. Maybe it’s a matter of taste, or only important for some types of story. Or maybe it’s actually a bad idea, and the rest of the film had to make up for the early mistake. I don’t know yet, so I’ll mark it as a data point and keep the question in mind while I keep studying and see if I can develop an answer.
Now for the last question, “Why did the author do it?” In this example it’s pretty simple: George Lucas wanted to give the audience a bunch of information about the Star Wars universe right at the start of the film. Once we’ve established that fact, we can use it to refine our own writing by asking follow up questions like, “Did it accomplish his goal?” and, “Was there a better way to do it?” As we find different authors trying to accomplish the same goal in different ways, we can start comparing their techniques to find what works best, and when.
Now that we have our analytical outline, all that’s left is to decide who we’re studying.
Finding our Yodas
There’s an unbelievable number of excellent books out there, so you could spend your entire life analyzing stories with no danger of running out of material. At the end of the day, the biggest part of deciding who to study comes down to personal preference. When you think of a writer and say, “Man, I wish I was a tenth as good as they are,” put them on your list.
As my Star Wars example may have given away, I’ll also be analyzing some movies. I’m including movies because I think a good film needs to hit all the same story points as a good book – just in a more condensed format – so great movies should have at least as much to teach as great books. This may turn out to be incorrect, but even if that’s the case, learning why it’s incorrect will be valuable.
As we pick what to study, there are two general approaches I can think of:
The first is to pick a type of story you want to learn. Maybe you love a genre, like romance, crime thriller, or space opera. Or you can also be more general, and try to learn plotlines like Overcoming the Monster, or Rags to Riches. With this approach, you’d find the best examples you can of the type of story you want to learn and study them all. Because it focuses more on the type of story than the author’s writing, this probably lends itself to studying story structure more than writing technique. (But that doesn’t mean you should ignore the author’s writing while you’re doing it!)
The second is to pick an author whose work you love and study them specifically. With this approach you’d find a writer you admire and want to emulate, then dig deep into what makes them so good at what they do. Because this approach focuses on just one writer, it’s probably a better way to study their specific writing techniques than overall story structure.
These two approaches are absolutely not exclusive, and I expect we’ll swap back and forth as we find weaknesses and work to correct them. I lay out what I’m going to start by focusing on in this post, but before we get into that, we’ve only looked at the first element of deliberate practice. Next, we need to understand exactly what we’re hoping to gain with all this analysis and the practice that comes after. The answer, and the title of the next blog post, is Mental Representations.
