Tag: Goals

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!”

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.

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:

  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.