Discipline – By Aaron Lowry

The Starting Line

Ready or not, the day has come – there are only 200 days left to achieve my goal of completing a 100,000 word novel by the February 25th, 2019.

Today is important because it marks an unofficial start date. If I’m to reach my goal, I need to start writing 500 words a day, every day, until I reach the finish line. Writing more will soften this deadline somewhat, but the race has definitely started, and it seems as good a time as any to review my progress thus far.

First, the good. I’ve finished The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and while reading Campbell was often an exasperating experience, I have a grasp on the hero’s journey that was sorely lacking in my projects of years gone by. My grip on the subject grew firmer still by contrasting Campbell’s work with Christopher Vogler’s. The theoretical parts of my project, at least, seem under control.

I’ve analyzed the first Star Wars film, as well as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and much of The Hobbit. I learned a great deal from these masterworks, and the pages of notes I took on each wait restlessly for the day they’ll be turned into blog posts.

Outside of the blog, I’ve built a durable storyboard of the novel I’ll be writing. There are still a few unresolved questions and plot points to hammer out, but I have more than enough to start.

Now for the bad. As mentioned, while I have reviewed several of the great Hero’s Journey stories, I have not yet taken the time to smelt my raw material into content for the blog. This is not just a problem as a content creator – the process of writing an essay helps solidify knowledge and expose gaps in understanding, so I want to complete these analyses before getting too far into my project.

An even greater problem is the shamefully small amount of time I’ve spent applying the practice techniques detailed at the start of the blog. This may turn out to be a boon, since in the meantime I’ve discovered several writers of literary fiction whose mastery of English is vastly superior to some of the authors I considered studying, but I’m still perilously behind where I wanted to be. I can only hope that any improvements in writing technique achieved during the final months of the project can be applied through edits.

Finally, my recent trip to Nigeria was both enriching and enlightening, but I didn’t get any work done. I hope to at least slightly make up for this lapse by releasing the Hero’s Journey toolbox as soon as possible. It’s been coming together quickly since my return, so with any luck it will be ready in the next couple weeks.

And that brings us to the heart of my next challenge. I’ve written three (unpublishable) novels of 100,000 words or more at the slow-but-steady rate of 500 words a day, but never while trying to simultaneously maintain a blog. “Does that mean,” you may ask, “that your already languid rate of posting will decrease even further?” Not if I have anything to say about it. The challenge of doing it is the point of doing it, and so, to appropriate a line, “Damn the distractions, full speed ahead!”

Discipline: The Path to Freedom

We’ve saved the best – or at least the most important – for last. Like 95% of aspiring authors the #1 reason I’ve failed to get published is lack of discipline, and for any of the practice techniques we’ve talked about to work we need to start by fixing that problem.

You may have heard of the ‘Ten Thousand Hour,’ rule. Ironically, it’s based on a misinterpretation of some of the research Anders Ericsson performed while discovering deliberate practice. The rule supposedly says that to become an expert in any field, you need to invest at least ten thousand hours of practice.

This turns out to not be entirely accurate (the truth is both more and less daunting, check out page 109 of Peak for more details), but it does help put the challenge in perspective. If you invested an hour of practice a day, every day, you’d complete your ten thousand hours in a bit more than 27 years.

Oof.

The ten thousand hour rule has significant flaws, so don’t get discouraged. But it’s clear that the path to becoming a great writer isn’t one we’re finishing in a few months, or even a few years. So how do we build the willpower to keep working day after day after day until we reach our goal?

For help, I’m turning to two men: retired Navy SEAL Jocko Willink, and our good friend Dr. Anders Ericsson.

Jocko Willink:

Jocko Willink is a former Navy SEAL officer turned writer, podcaster, and leadership trainer. He’s published an entire book in discipline – titled Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual – and nearly every page has something useful to say about maintaining willpower. I’m sure I’ll come back to his work in future posts, but for now I’m going to focus on the point that resonated with me the most:

Discipline leads to more discipline.

The thought is this: the more you practice discipline, even in little things, the better prepared you are to maintain it when it counts.

Borrowing one of Jocko’s examples: imagine that you woke up early in the morning and went right to the gym. Then you ate a healthy breakfast, packed a good lunch, and went to work. A little before lunchtime one of your co-workers brings around a box of donuts for the team.

Do you take the donut?

Jocko argues, and I agree, that you probably won’t. Just like how an object in motion tends to remain in motion, a person practicing discipline in all areas is much more likely to maintain it when it’s challenged. For us, that means sitting down to write even when we don’t feel like it.

Now imagine the inverse of Jocko’s scenario. Instead of getting up early, you woke up late. You didn’t get any exercise and stopped by Starbucks for breakfast. When the donuts come around, isn’t it easy to feel like just having just one won’t do much harm?

Then later that evening, if you’re tired and don’t really feel up to writing, you might think that skipping your practice time isn’t that big of a deal. After all, you can always catch up tomorrow. Right?

NO. WRONG ANSWER.

Discipline is a choice. We choose to eat the donut or we don’t, and we choose to sit down and write or we don’t. The first step is choosing that writing is important to us and we’re going to make it happen. Every day. Whether we feel like it or not. Even if we’re just going through the motions, we choose to write.

After that we take on other factors that affect our decision, the things that make it easier or harder to make the right choice. I want to make sure I’m making the right decisions about my practice, so instead of just trying to get disciplined about writing, I’m bringing discipline to my entire day. That way when I’m tempted to skip a practice session or stop a bit early, the discipline and good habits I’ve been forging will be there to keep me on the right path.

And one last point: there will absolutely be times that I fail. If I miss a practice session I won’t berate myself forever, but I’ll recognize that, for that day, I let my dream down. If I want to become a successful writer, every day I don’t practice is a day that I screwed up.

The details of what I’m planning are at the end of this post, but before I lay them out let’s hear from Dr. Ericsson.

Dr. Anders Ericsson:

As a part of his research, Dr. Ericsson asked how students maintain the motivation to keep practicing, often for several hours every day, for the decades it takes to master a complicated skill. He discusses his findings on page 165 of Peak, but these were my key takeaways.

First, no one loves practicing. It’s easy to think that a student who sits down and practices the violin for three hours a day must simply love playing the violin, but Dr. Ericsson found that even students who devote large amounts of time to their craft would usually much rather be off with friends or enjoying some other form of entertainment. The successful performers are universally the ones who found ways to keep practicing even when they didn’t enjoy it.

Second, there is no evidence that willpower is an innate characteristic. No one is born with a genetic gift for willpower or discipline, and everyone who develops these traits has to work for it. Barring some major medical condition, there’s no reason that any of us cannot learn to practice.

Third, and in line with Jocko, the people who maintained their practice regimen long term had to redesign their lives and build new habits to support their practice goals. This goes way beyond just scheduling a time to practice. The best students built their day around their practice and had a good sense of the time they spent on different tasks, even (or perhaps especially) their leisure time. This let them make sure they always had the time needed for practice.

Fourth, the students minimized the factors that get in the way of practicing. Smartphone: off. Imgur: closed. Workspace: neat, organized and ready to go. This applies in a broader context as well. For example, being tired makes it much harder to practice, so simply getting enough sleep was an important first step.

Fifth and finally, the students maximized the factors that encourage practice. This is a bit more vague because it varies from person to person, but Dr. Ericsson mentions how many students surrounded themselves with like-minded and motivated people, and eventually took great pride in their skill as their performance improved. Especially early on, reminders of why they were practicing were critical to keep them moving forward.

The Plan:

Now that we’ve collected all that advice, what’s the plan? This list will certainly change over time, but to start my goals are:

Get out of bed early. First alarm is set for 5:45 AM, with the goal of out of bed by 6:00. 6:30 at the absolute latest. This will require that I get to bed at a reasonable hour. I know that for a lot of people 5:45 AM isn’t a terribly impressive wake-up time, but it’s much earlier than I used to get up and it gives me the time I need for what I have planned in the morning.
Exercise. At least a half-hour before work, and probably more as I get back into shape. I’ll also be going to jiujutsu class at least once a week. Health makes it easier to focus, the morning exercise will wake me up, and it’s a great area to build up discipline.
Good decisions, by which I mean eating better, de-cluttering my desk, keeping my apartment clean, and so on. This may seem petty, or at least unrelated creative writing, but I firmly believe that these little disciplines are critical for making sure I maintain my practice goals. Speaking of which . . .
Practice, for at least an hour a day. I work from 9 AM to 5:30 PM and the cafeteria is nice and quiet, so my goal is to arrive at work at least an hour early and get in my practice time. On weekends or if the cafe isn’t available, I’ll be at my desk at home. An hour is the bare minimum, so if I have any free time (such as when eating lunch) I’ll be looking to pump that rookie number up.
The practice log. Part motivation and part timekeeper, I’ll keep a public log of the times I exercise, practice, write blog posts. and so on. This will make it easy to tell if I’m slipping and prod me with a bit of embarrassment if I start slacking off.

If I can meet these goals I should be well on my way towards creating the discipline I need to keep practicing.

***

And with that, we’ve covered the basics of deliberate practice and how I’ll apply it to my writing. The next post will lay out my starting point, and after that we’re off to the races. Let’s get to it.

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:

Yellow tags mean important info, blue tags mean something that’s just awesome.

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:

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.
Begin writing something. I was told not to worry if it’s bad, just get the words on paper.
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.
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.
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.
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.