Chapter 15

Power and Responsibility

When we can take the green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power—upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes. It does not follow that we shall use that power well on any plane. We may put a deadly green upon a man’s face and produce horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause weeds to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire in the belly of the cold worm.

—J.R.R. Tolkien

The Dance of Writing

At the beginning of this book I talked about the two kinds of writer’s mind: content mind and craft mind; I distinguished between large-scale craft and the craft of making sentences, the latter requiring a trained word mind. Although we have now spent fourteen chapters concentrating on training the word mind, you probably found, in practicing, that you sometimes came up with ideas and material you want to use for a story, or a poem, or an essay. For the purposes of practice, we separate the two minds, but they are naturally intertwined. As we write and revise, we switch back and forth between these two minds, one minute focusing hard on what we want to say, or on making a picture more vivid in our mind, and the next seeking just the right word to convey that thought or vision. As I have said earlier, this back-and-forth movement between content and craft reminds me of a dance, with first one partner leading, then the other. I find it quite miraculous that our two minds can partner each other in this way, moving so closely together that sometimes it seems our word mind is giving us ideas for content and our content mind is leading us to words.

As you now know, practice will strengthen your word mind so that it can collaborate well with your content mind and be an equal partner in the dance. (The same is true for practices that strengthen your content mind.) Practice will set you free to enjoy the experience of the dance of writing: that back-and-forth movement, the exhilaration of those moments when both partners are achieving the best they are capable of.

It’s in such moments, when all our faculties are working well, and working together, that we can experience a sense of our power as writers, a confidence in our abilities, a feeling of mastery of our craft. After working through the exercises in this book, you have had, I hope, a few of these moments.

The Journey Towards Mastery

I hope, too, that you want to continue your journey towards mastery in making sentences. There’s a lot to learn; and in this book I have presented only some basics. In the "For Further Reading" list at the end of the book you will find a number of resources to help you keep building your skills.

You will be able to make the best use of these resources if you think of your learning as an ongoing journey. Every expert, in any field, eventually becomes her own coach. You can do the same thing. Keep checking in with yourself to see which skills you need to learn or practice right now, then figure out which book or teacher to consult to help you learn those skills.

Here’s a practice to help you become your own coach, one I encourage you to return to frequently. It will help you establish and stay on your own learning path.

Practice: Becoming Your Own Coach

I invite you now to take some time to think about this book from the point of view of your own learning journey as a writer. Use the freewriting (nonstop writing) technique, if you find that helpful, and let the following questions serve as a guide for your reflections.

What have you learned from this book? What can you do now with words that you couldn’t do before? Make a list of all the skills you feel you now have. Mark the ones you especially want to keep practicing.

Next, make some notes to yourself about how you want to continue your learning journey. Where is your present “learning edge”—the place where you are on the verge of understanding something new, the place where you can see the road of your further learning unrolling before you? What do you want to know about writing now? What do you want to be able to do that you can’t quite do yet? Make a list of the skills you need to work on.

Now consider this: How can you learn the things you want to learn? Are there books you might read? People you can talk with? Writers to study and learn from? Most of all: What are the practices you want to keep using regularly? Perhaps you might like to make a “learning plan” for yourself for the next few months.

As you do this reflecting, I hope you will keep in mind that becoming a writer is a lifelong learning journey. You don’t have to “get it” all at once. I encourage you to take to heart these words the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to a young aspiring poet who had sought his advice: “Strive always to be a beginner.”

I love that piece of advice because it reminds me that learning is cyclical, not linear. Just as a major league hitter takes batting practice almost every day, practicing the same moves over and over, so we writers can practice the same things every day, the same basics. We can go deeper, rather than further, in our learning, noticing new things, getting new insight into our own learning process and the nature of language.

Practicing in the Work

Some years ago I heard the baseball player Sean Casey, then with the Red Sox, being interviewed by Joe Castiglione, the Red Sox radio broadcaster. Casey hadn’t been playing much, and Joe C. asked him how he kept his skills sharp. Casey replied, “Even when I’m not in the lineup, I practice every day, I take my cuts in batting practice. I need to stay ready in case I get called into a game.”

Like athletes and musicians, we writers need to practice, even when we’re not engaged in a work-in-progress, so that we can keep our skills sharp, so we can be “in shape” when we want to (or have to) write a finished piece.

We can also see practice as something that we can do “in the work”—that is, as we are writing and revising our work-in-progress. Each writer needs to find his own way of practicing in the work. Many writers, for example, set aside all considerations of craft as they write a draft and instead concentrate entirely on what they want to say. Then, when they revise, they bring a well-trained craft mind to bear on the sentences and paragraphs they have produced. Other writers aim for the “dance” I described above, allowing content mind and craft mind to collaborate as they write and revise.

Yet another approach to practicing in the work is to select one or two craft skills and be aware of them as you write your story, poem, or essay. You might, for instance, say to yourself, “As I write this story, I’m going to concentrate on nouns,” or “As I write this poem, I’m going to try to include interrogative and exclamatory sentences.”

Perhaps you feel that setting such goals is too artificial, that it will interfere with your creativity. For the past several decades, most creative writing instruction has equated creativity with complete freedom. But the truth is that, in order to work at its best, our creative faculty needs limits.

Practice: Use Selected Skills in Your Work

Select one or two skills you have learned and focus on them as you write a short piece or a section of a longer work-in-progress. Afterwards take some time to reflect: How did this go? What did you notice?

If you find this practice useful, make it part of your repertoire. I also encourage you to spend some time thinking about other ways you might practice in the work, as you go about producing and revising your drafts. You can also practice in the work when you write e-mails or blog posts, business memos, reports, academic papers—or anything else.

Remember that while you will undoubtedly experience those moments when writing feels like a dance in which you cannot put a foot wrong, like all peak experiences, these moments are fleeting. Professional athletes and musicians spend hours every day in practice; their performances last only a few hours. If we see practice only as a way to improve our performance, we may be very disappointed when tomorrow’s chapter does not go as well as today’s. Practice, ultimately, is a way to live as writers, a way to be writers all the time, not just when things are going well.

As with most things, there is much about writing that we cannot control: whether ideas come to us when we need them, whether readers like our work, whether agents and editors deem it worthy of publication. But practice is something we can always choose to do, and when we make that choice, we receive many benefits in addition to the improvement of writing skills.

The Benefits of The Mastery Path

Writing practice gives us an opportunity to do an activity we love anytime, anyplace. To produce a draft of a piece of writing we want others to read is a lot of work; it’s a complex activity, like playing a complete game of basketball, so it requires a considerable amount of time, energy, and mental space. But to practice one particular writing skill—well, we can do that just about anytime we want, especially if we always have our writer’s notebook nearby. Because our focus is narrowed to one specific aspect of writing, we can make use of tiny windows of practicing opportunity during our busy days: five minutes here, ten minutes there.

Such dedication to practice does more for us than build our writing skills: It improves our ability to concentrate. Every time we focus our attention on doing one specific writing exercise, we also give ourselves practice in an essential life skill: being aware of our attention and focusing it in a particular direction. As Ben Hogan, the world-class golfer, once explained, “While I am practicing, I am also trying to develop my powers of concentration. I never just walk up and hit the ball.”1… just walk up and hit the ball.” Quoted in K. Anders Ericsson, et al, “The Making of an Expert,” p. 4. Just as Hogan then brought his improved powers of concentration to performance situations, so we can bring our honed attentional abilities to our work-in-progress. Just as important, in our world where distraction is a way of life, gaining control over our attention through practice is a skill that will serve us well in the world beyond writing.

Dedication to practice teaches us patience, as well. You have probably already discovered, in using this book, that sometimes you didn’t understand a skill right away. Sometimes, on your learning journey, you probably felt you were stuck, not moving forward.

This experience may have made you feel very frustrated; perhaps you were tempted to give up. Perhaps you even said to yourself, “I’ll never get this!” Or even, “I just can’t write.” These thoughts and feelings are very common when we take a learning journey. A certain amount of frustration, in fact, is an inevitable part of learning. That’s because frustration visits us only when we try to do things we don’t already know how to do. But if we do only those things we can already do, then we never learn anything new.

Those people who become experts in their fields are not those who are necessarily naturally gifted; they are those who don’t give up in the face of frustration. Albert Einstein, for instance, once said, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer than most people.”2… longer than most people.” Quoted in David Shenk, The Genius in All of Us (Doubleday, 2010), p. 112. It’s that ability to stay with problems, to wrestle with the things we can’t do, that distinguishes those who become masters in their field.

We also need patience for those times in our learning journey when nothing seems to be happening. George Leonard, a writer, teacher, and black belt in aikido, has called these times “the plateau,” and he has written that, if we want to make progress at our chosen activity, we need to learn to love the plateau.3… love the plateau. George Leonard, The Mastery Path: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment (Penguin, 1992), p. 15.

Directing our own learning; dedicating ourselves to practice; persistence; patience: These are the characteristics of those who have chosen the path to mastery. We don’t have to be born with these character traits, which are so important to success in life; we can build them through dedication to any practice, including writing.

Perhaps the greatest benefit we can derive from practice, apart from building our skills, is that writing practice is good for our brains. Even if we never get published, every time we do a writing practice, we are building the mental muscles in the parts of our brain that have to do with language.

Finally, and most important, when we dedicate ourselves to writing practice, we provide ourselves with a certain kind of pleasure: the pleasure of learning something new, the pleasure of moving towards mastery.

From Play to Deliberate Practice

I have said that practice is a form of play; and I have suggested that such play gives us pleasure. I have insisted on these things because so many people think of practice as mindless, boring drills to be avoided at all cost. For those new to practice as a learning path, there must be, I think, an immediate reward in the form of a feeling of satisfaction or pleasure.

It’s also true, though, that the expertise researchers (see Chapter 2) insist that practice is not fun. They are talking about what K. Anders Ericsson calls “deliberate practice,” which he defines as “considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all.”4… or even at all. K. Anders Ericsson, et al, “The Making of an Expert,” p. 3.

Is this kind of intense practice necessary for writers? I suspect it is—at least for those who aspire to become outstanding. Certainly repetition is the key to learning skills, in any field; like athletes and musicians, aspiring writers need to practice their skills repeatedly, until they become second nature. Those who want to become experts also continually challenge themselves by combining skills, pushing their “learning edge” just a little bit further. You can do this, too. Once you’ve mastered a few of the techniques in this book, challenge yourself by inventing practices in which you use these techniques together: See, for example, if you can write with concrete words while also using bound modifiers; or try to write a compound sentence that includes free modifiers.

Another key element of deliberate practice is to compare what you have produced with a model of excellence. The elite performers Ericsson and his colleagues studied did this routinely, by comparing their own performance with the performance of people who had better skills. They would then examine their own abilities with a critical eye, assessing what they did well and what they still had to work on. It’s fairly easy to do this kind of assessment in sports or music; it’s a lot more difficult with writing. That’s because there is no single standard for excellence in writing, nothing we can quantify the way we can count points scored or stolen bases, to be able to say, “This person’s performance is the best.” Still, I do think it’s possible for writers to choose their own models of excellence. In this book, I have repeatedly invited you to learn from writers whose work you love. If you want to make more conscious use of the principles of deliberate practice, then use what you have learned to identify your chosen writer’s skills. Then ask yourself whether you can do those things—or do them as well. If not, see if you can figure out exactly what your model writer can do that you can’t, and then work on those skills.

Becoming a skilled writer takes time, lots of it. You may find yourself wishing that someone would just tell you exactly what you are doing wrong—or right. Perhaps at this point you will want to look for a teacher or a writing coach. People who want to be the best at what they do deliberately seek out coaches who can help them work on their weaknesses. At the same time, though, most top performers have learned how to coach themselves; they study their own work, identify the problems, and learn how to fix them. Even professional writers are always learning and developing their skills. As I mentioned in my first book, How to Be a Writer, Leo Tolstoy once happened to pick up one of his own early books at the house of a friend. After glancing through it for a few moments, he exclaimed, “Oh, this is terrible! Now I see how I should have written this!”

Perhaps you have the time, energy, and inclination to take your practice to more intense levels; perhaps you do not. Either way, though, if you develop the skills presented in this book to whatever extent you can, you will have gained power. As I said at the beginning of this book, mastery of diction and syntax enables you to wield a kind of magical power over the minds of your readers: to make them understand what you are saying; to make them see your visions, feel your characters’ emotions, and be riveted by your story.

That’s a considerable power to be able to wield. And when you possess this power—or any other kind—you will eventually be brought up against a vital question: How will you use it?

Power and Responsibility

As writers who can make use of the power of language, what is our responsibility? That’s not a question that gets asked very often in creative writing workshops, but it’s one I always ask my students. Very often, they are surprised by the question, and they reply, “My only responsibility is to express myself.”

I understand why they give this answer: For quite some time now, writing instruction books and workshop leaders have told aspiring writers that creative writing is all about self-expression, with the emphasis on the “self.” In the United States, we’ve lived through several decades where self-focus has been the norm in the culture at large, so it’s no wonder that this attitude has made its way into the world of creative writing.

I think this is an unhealthy attitude, for many reasons, and so I invite you now to consider your writing skills in the light of how you can use them responsibly. For I believe that this responsibility inevitably becomes yours when you choose to put your writing out into the world. If you are writing only for yourself, then the matter of responsibility doesn’t arise; but if you are going public with your words, then, I think, you need to consider their possible effect on other people.

So, for instance, will your words celebrate violence and hatred? Will they create nightmarish pictures—in Tolkien’s words, will they “put green upon a man’s face and create horror”? As soon as such questions are raised, some people inevitably raise the subject of censorship. So I want to make it clear that I am not laying down any rules about what you should or should not make public; I am, rather, saying that when you have acquired power, you ought to use that power in a responsible manner. I am inviting you to consider what you feel is your responsibility as a skilled writer.

One responsibility you might want to shoulder is that of using words with accuracy and clarity. Another might be to consider yourself as a caretaker of the English language. As the mass media continue to focus our attention on visual images rather than language, you might wish to take on the job of keeping alive and celebrating the richness of English diction and syntax. Finally, you might think about what you, as an educated writer, have to offer readers, about what you want to give them—or teach them—through the medium of the written word.

Practice: What Is Your Responsibility?

Do some thinking on the page, using freewriting, about what you consider to be your responsibility as a writer. How do you want to use the power with words you have now acquired?

Moving On

As we come to the end of this book, I hope you feel that your learning journey has been an enjoyable and productive one. I encourage you to remember that learning is a spiral, not a straight line, and that you can return to the practices in the book anytime you like to further develop your skills. In moving forward, you may also feel that now you are ready to consult some of the resources in the list that follows this chapter, or to find a teacher or writing coach. Whatever your next steps, I hope you will remember that the best thing about being a writer is that it provides a journey in lifelong learning.

May your own continuing journey be a fulfilling and joyful one.