How Deliberate Practice Can Improve Your Writing
Deliberate practice is a highly structured activity with the specific goal of improving performance.
The work of K Anders Erickson, Malcom Gladwell, Geoff Colvin, Matthew Syed and Cal Newport among others focus on the importance of deliberate practice in improving performance and it is cited as the reason for many great sporting and musical achievements.
My first experience of this was when as a small child I was encouraged to play the violin. My teacher suggested I practice for one hour a day. The screeching and scraping of the bow across the strings led my parents to invest in ear plugs but the local cats seemed to enjoy it and joined in with their own version of what I was playing.
Through this I learned that deliberate practice is more than the simple repetition of a task. Learning a new skill requires effort, has no immediate or monetary reward and is not inherently enjoyable for me or the people around me.
Over the years I learned to drive, touch type and run a marathon and with hindsight realise I had been using many of the principles of deliberate practice but what is it and can it help us to improve our writing skills?
None of us is born with innate writing ability so we should apply ourselves and work hard at the craft. Deliberate practice is one way we can do this.
When we engage in deliberate practice, improving our performance over time is our goal and motivation. We are taking time out as Steven Covey remarked to “sharpen the saw” and increase the efficiency and impact of our writing.
Improving your writing skills or developing the discipline required to sit down and write and does take time and it is important that we stay in the learning zone.
The concept of practice can be divided into three zones: the comfort zone, the learning zone, and the panic zone.
The comfort zone doesn’t help us because we can already do the activities easily, the panic zone leads us to panic as the activities are too difficult and we don’t know where to start.
The only way to make progress is to operate in the learning zone, which involves those activities just out of reach.
Deliberate writing practice must have:
· A specific goal in mind
· Be aimed at improving performance
· Designed with our current skill level in mind
· Have immediate feedback
· Be repeated again and again
You can work on techniques but if you can’t see the effects, you may not get any better and you may stop caring.
Not getting feedback has been likened to playing ten pin bowling with a curtain in front of the pins. There are situations when a teacher, coach, or mentor is vital for providing crucial feedback.
A golfer just hitting a bucket of balls isn’t engaging in deliberate practice and a writer simply writing a lot isn’t either.
Here are a few simple exercises you could try:
1. Pick an object in the room or a memory you have and write about it for about five minutes. Repeat and review a few times. Get feedback on your different versions.
2. Commit to writing at a specific time and amount every day. Challenge yourself to increase your word count and encourage others to join in the challenge which will make you more accountable.
3. Make a list of all the things you want to write about. Every day pick one item from the list and write non-stop for 10 minutes, writing down any material that comes to mind on the subject. This can strengthen your creativity and ability to come up with new ideas.
4. Spend 10 minutes editing a short piece of your work. Re-edit for another 10 minutes. Pass to someone else for their comments and views.
What you decide to focus on will depend where you feel your writing could improve most. You can identify your weaknesses and deliberately work to improve them. It may help to create a plan for your own development as a writer.
My violin playing did improve and I completed my music exams and even joined a youth orchestra. My parents finally removed the ear plugs and the cats stopped joining in-all due to deliberate practice.
As writers we are often in a rush to get published but devoting a little time, on a daily basis, to deliberate practice can only enhance the quality and success of the work we produce.