Tag: Getting Started

The Staring Line: Here we go!

Now that I’ve laid out the theory of deliberate practice, it’s time to make some concrete plans. To get started, I need to decide two things:

  1. What are the specific goals I’m aiming for?
  2. Who are the expert performers that I’m going to study?

In general, I enjoy science fiction, fantasy, and horror in that order. Because of this I’m going to focus on authors from those genres, but genre isn’t a specific enough goal for deliberate practice. Altered Carbon and The Martian are two of my favorite recent books and both are science fiction, but they have about as much in common as airplanes and helicopters.

So instead of focusing on genre, I’m going to work on a type of story. Given that this is my first attempt to learn a story type, I figure I’ll start with something ubiquitous, that everyone knows and almost everyone uses. With that in mind, the type of story I’ve decided to work on first is the original, the classic, the story-that-began-all-stories, the Hero’s Journey.

With that decision, a number of questions are immediately answered. Which authors have written the best hero’s journeys? Two names leap to mind: J.K. Rowling and J.R.R. Tolkien. If I expand the question to film, George Lucas and the Wachowski brothers join the team. There’s also an academic and psychological breakdown of the story type in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I’ll use these five resources as my starting point and expand from there.

But this plan still isn’t solid enough. Remember: “Deliberate practice focuses on specific goals and develops lesson plans to reach them bit by bit.” So how about this: first, I’m going to focus on mastering the structure of the story. I’ll analyze my four primary sources and Joseph Campbell’s work, then use what I learned to lay out the general path of the hero’s journey.

Then, after I’ve gotten a good handle on the key story events, I’ll pick the best example of each event from my pool of primary sources. Once I’ve chosen my exemplars I’ll use Benjamin Franklin’s hints exercise to examine how the author handled the scene and simultaneously study their writing style. I’ll repeat as needed with examples from the each author’s work until I feel confident enough to try applying what I’ve learned in an original novel.

And that’s the endgame. Within the next 12 months, I’ll write an original hero’s journey story of at least 100,000 words.

The average novel has between 80,000 and 140,000 words, so I think 100,000 is an appropriate target. In the past my goal was to write 500 words a day, a number I deliberately kept low to ensure I wouldn’t get overwhelmed. I found it’s much easier to aim for a low target and routinely surpass it than to set a high goal I couldn’t consistently reach.

500 words a day gets me to 100,000 words in a bit more than seven months. If I manage 1,000 words a day I’ll finish in slightly more than three months. That means I’ll have at least five and perhaps up to six or seven months for studying, after which I need to start hitting word count goals. I’ll also need to carve out time for writing posts on the Practice Write blog while maintaining a job and hopefully having some occasional free time for a life. I’ve found that editing can stretch on and on almost without end (especially if I deliberately take some time to cool off from a story) so I’m not going to include it in my 12 month goal.  

It’s a brisk pace, but it seems doable. So that’s the plan: by the 25th of February, 2019, I’ll have analyzed and studied at least (in reality, definitely more than) 4 hero’s journey stories, built a mental representation of how the story works, and written an original hero’s journey novel of at least 100,000 words.

Gauntlet thrown. Let’s get to it.

The Top 2 Percent: An Introduction to the Practice Write Project

If you’re reading this part of the blog, I’m going to assume that, like me, your goal is to one day make a living as an author of fiction. If that’s the case, let’s start by going over some sobering statistics.

The 2014 Digital Book World and Writer’s Digest Author Survey gathered information from 9,210 writers about their income. When the results were tallied, they found that 54% of traditionally published authors and almost 80% of self-published authors were making less than $1,000 a year from their work. About 70% of the surveyed writers earned less than $10,000 a year, and only the top 2% of authors made a good living from writing alone.

These facts are daunting, but they make sense. The average person reads at most a few books a year, and even an avid reader who gets through a book a week only consumes fifty-two. The supply of books vastly outstrips the demand, so readers quite naturally choose to invest their limited time in only the very best.

Does this mean we should give up on our dream of becoming career authors? Absolutely not. But it does mean we need to commit to writing like aspiring Olympians, and aim from the very start at being one of the best in the world.

That realization is what got me started on the Practice Write Project. For the last fifteen years I’ve tried the standard approach for up-and-coming authors, and to put it bluntly, it hasn’t worked. I can put together a tolerable story, and maybe could eventually convince someone to publish it, but it’s not good enough to land in that 2% where I could earn a decent living.

After I recognized this problem I struggled with it for several months, and eventually came to the following conclusion: this failure is entirely my fault. My problem is not lack of talent. It’s not bad luck. It’s not because I haven’t networked enough or kissed the right behinds. My problem is that writing is a skill, and I haven’t invested enough time in the right kinds of practice to master it.

So instead of continuing to do the standard approach over and over and hoping for a different result, I’m going to try to find a new path based on the most recent findings from the psychological study of human expertise. The best approach yet discovered is called deliberate practice, and if you’re sick of just writing and writing and hoping to someday get a break, it’ll hit you like a blast of fresh air.

If you write purely for the joy of it, this project is probably not for you. Deliberate practice is often difficult, boring, frustrating, time-consuming, and overall not very fun. But so far it’s led to improvement in every field where it’s been applied, and I believe that writing will be no different. In this blog I’ll record what works, cut what doesn’t, and try to leave a few footprints for other writers to follow. I hope you enjoy.

Welcome to the Practice Write Project. Let’s sit down, and get started.