Chapter 2

Claiming Your Power: Learning Through Practice

Most people won’t realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.

—Katherine Anne Porter

Practice is not something just to read about; it’s something to do.

That’s a central theme of this book, and I repeat it here (as I will frequently in the upcoming pages) because most of us are used to learning through study, not practice. We’re used to reading and taking notes, perhaps thinking about what we’ve read or talking about it with other people. If we’re in school (in a liberal arts program), we show we’ve studied well by producing term papers or taking exams. Rarely, if ever, in our progress through the conventional academic system, do we do anything with what we’ve studied.

In other fields, though—sports, or music, or practical arts—learning through practice rules. Basketball players practice shooting baskets. Jazz musicians practice scales and intervals. Aspiring cooks apprentice themselves to masters to learn their skills. Even people learning a foreign language devote themselves to practice. This is a different way to learn from the one most of us are used to. Different, and—when it comes to learning how to write—much, much better.

Imagine, if you will, a group of kids who want to learn how to play baseball. The coach spends an hour with them, three times a week, and they talk about baseball. They learn its history and read about star players; they watch films of outstanding plays; they have discussions about what makes certain players great. And then they go out to play a game. How well will they play?

You may laugh at the absurdity of this example; but replace “baseball” with “writing” and you have a pretty good idea of what goes on in most literature and writing classes: People talk about writing; they don’t do it. But the domain of literary analysis and theory and criticism is not the same as the domain of writing; and so, if we want to improve our writing skills, we have to exercise our writing muscles, not our ability to discuss and critique. We have to practice doing what skilled writers do.

And the truth is that real writers do practice: They keep notebooks and sketchbooks, just like visual artists. They write lots of pieces that they never publish, to try out ideas and techniques, to develop their skills. Since these pieces remain unpublished, we don’t get to read them, so we assume that a “real writer” is somehow born being able to write well. Once we give up this assumption, though, we are free to use the powerful learning tool of practice, just as professionals do.

So, if you believe that improving your writing skills means learning how to think and talk about writing, I invite you now to abandon that idea. I encourage you, instead to focus on learning to write through practice.

What Is Practice?

For many people, the word practice means “mindless drill”—memorizing the multiplication tables or all the prefixes in the English language. But drill and practice are not the same at all.

To begin with, practice is play: It’s doing something over and over again because you want to, because you enjoy the activity, because your mind is completely engaged. Many famous writers spent countless happy hours in childhood writing poems and stories; the Brontë sisters (and their brother), for instance, produced a number of miniature illustrated books of their own stories. Many of us, though, were not so fortunate. We learned to write in school, where our writing was almost always judged and graded; we became used to doing what I call “performance” writing, writing that counts. As adults, many of us continue to write under performance conditions, trying to produce something good, something others will praise. But performance conditions usually create anxiety, which interferes with our creativity and makes it hard for us to write well. After years of writing under performance conditions, it can be difficult for us, especially those of us who are adults, to allow ourselves the freedom to play with words.

But a playful attitude is, I’m convinced, essential to learning through practice. I don’t mean that writing practice shouldn’t be taken seriously; I mean that you’ll get the most out of it if you bring to it, not the judgmental attitude of an old-fashioned English teacher—Oh, I did that wrong!—but the engaged curiosity of a healthy child—I wonder what will happen if I try THIS?

To let yourself play with writing, remember that practice is totally different from performance. Practice writing is always private writing. No one will ever see it unless you decide to share it. When you sit down to practice, if you find yourself tense or anxious, remember that practice writing is not for other people; it’s your own private playing field where you get to fool around, experiment, and see what happens.

For some of you, though, this reminder may not be enough. After years of writing in school or at work, you may have created an internal judge, or critic, who waits inside you to criticize whatever you put on the page. I urge you to do your best to ignore this judge as you practice. (Spending time with the exercise at the end of this chapter will help.) These inner judges kill our spirit, and their criticism—That’s terrible! You can’t write!—interferes with the simple noticing of what is (or isn’t) there in our words, an activity that allows us to learn and move forward. When that inner judge raises his voice, keep telling yourself I’m only practicing.

If you are plagued by an inner critic, or you’ve had unpleasant experiences with writing, or you get anxious when you write, or you’d just like to fool around with words for a while, then you may want to let your first time through some or all of the practices be guided entirely by the spirit of play.

Practice as Learning

With play as our foundation, we can use practice as a learning tool. One of the essential characteristics of a practice activity is that it is designed to be repeated, not just once but many times. That’s because repetition embeds things in our brains; repetition actually changes the nature of our brains. As Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code, explains, “Every human skill, whether it’s playing baseball or playing Bach, is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse—basically, a signal traveling through a circuit.”1… a signal traveling through a circuit. Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code, p. 5. The more we practice a skill, the more we develop these circuits in our brains. One of Coyle’s sources, an eminent neurologist, says, “All skills, all language, all music, all movements, are made of living circuits, and all circuits grow according to certain rules.”2… all circuits [can] grow. Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code, p. 6. As long as our brains remain healthy, we can keep “growing” these mental circuits and keep acquiring new skills and improving the ones we have. And the more time and energy we put into practice, the more our skills (and our brains) will grow.

In centers all over the world where athletes and musicians come to develop their skills, coaches and teachers are putting the principle of learning through practice into action. They are teaching skills in a way that reflects how the brain learns best, through a process known as chunking; namely, breaking down a complex skill into its component parts and guiding students to learn and practice each part separately. Daniel Coyle, who visited many of these centers, says, “The instinct to slow down and break skills into their components is universal … [and] a massive body of scientific research shows that this is precisely the way skills are built.”3… is precisely the way skills are built. Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code, p. 80. Chunking explains how professionals make a difficult task look easy: Over time, having practiced those “chunks” of skills over and over and over, they are then able to put them all together and use them with the fluency and ease that is one of the hallmarks of expertise.

So, as you do the practices in this book, I urge you not to rush through them, even if you understand the material intellectually. Let yourself slow down so that your whole brain—even your body—can participate in each practice. In that way, the particular “move” each practice is teaching will become part of you, and eventually, when you use that “move” to compose a sentence, the result will appear effortless.

In this book, I have done my best to break down the complex skill of composing sentences into its component subskills and to give you exercises to develop each subskill in turn. I have used this progression of exercises in classes over a number of years because I think the earlier practices provide a solid foundation for the later ones. But if you wish to create your own learning path through the book, you can certainly do so. One of the best ways to do that is to invent your own practices.

Deliberate Practice

Once we’ve become familiar with the process of learning skills through practice, we can, if we like, move on to a more strenuous form of practicing, what Professor K. Anders Ericsson calls “deliberate practice.” (Coyle calls it “deep practice.”) Deliberate practice is what turns amateurs into professionals. Amateurs practice, of course, but they don’t engage in deliberate practice. What’s the difference?

Ericsson explains: “People who play tennis once a week for years don’t get any better if they do the same thing each time. Deliberate practice is about changing your performance, setting new goals and straining yourself to reach a bit higher each time. It involves you deciding to improve something and setting up training conditions to attain the skill … Those who get better work on their weaknesses.”4… work on their weaknesses. Professor K. Anders Ericsson, quoted in Anna Patty, “Why Only the Right Kind of Practice Gets Anywhere Near Perfect,” The Sydney Morning Herald, May 15, 2006.

Legendary golfer Sam Snead would have agreed with Ericsson. “It’s only human nature to want to practice what you can already do well,” Snead once said, “since it’s a hell of a lot less work and a hell of a lot more fun.” But it’s the people who devote themselves to developing skills they don’t already have who become experts. Snead also said, “When I was young, I’d play and practice all day, then practice more at night by my car’s headlights. My hands bled. Nobody worked harder at golf than I did.”5… harder at golf than I did. Quoted in K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokely, “The Making of an Expert,” Harvard Business Review, July-August, 2007.

Deliberate practice demands hard work, but hard work by itself is not enough; you also have to know what to work on. So deliberate practice, first of all, is highly focused. As Dr. Ericsson explains, deliberate practice is deliberate because it is “specifically designed to improve some aspect of an individual’s target performance.”6… some aspect of an individual’s target performance. From Gregg Schraw, “An Interview with K. Anders Ericsson, Educational Psychology Review, Vol. 17, No. 4, December 2005, p. 397.

Second, deliberate practice demands a change of attitude: no lackadaisical, “oh—whatever” approach works here. People engaged in deliberate practice are giving all of their attention and energy—every brain cell, every muscle—to that practice. As Ericsson points out, “For expert performers, there’s always effort. Improvement is never effortless.”7… Improvement is never effortless. Professor K. Anders Ericsson, quoted in Shelley Gare, “Success Is All in the Mind,” The Australian, January 24, 2009. At the same time, such people are not judging what they do; instead they’re noticing what’s working and what’s not working, and they are attempting to bridge the gap they perceive between what they can do and what they want to do. They bridge this gap in two ways: by getting a clearer, more detailed understanding of the action, the sound, the kind of word they want; and by taking on even more focused practice. In other words, they practice, not mindlessly or randomly, but strategically. It’s practice strategy (along with good coaching, determination, and perseverance) that separates experts from amateurs in the realm of learning. When experts fail, says one psychologist who studies how people learn, “they don’t blame it on luck or themselves. They have a strategy they can fix.”8… a strategy they can fix. Coyle, p. 87.

Third, deliberate practice involves challenging yourself to move past the things you can do easily and into the realm of what you can’t do, or can’t do well. You have to get comfortable balancing on what I like to call your “learning edge,” where you have one foot on the ground of what you already know how to do, and the other foot reaching forward into the unknown. You also have to be willing to tolerate the frustration of not being able to do a practice activity well the first or second time you try it, something many adults have difficulty with. But, as I always tell my students, “If you’re not frustrated some of the time as you’re learning, you’re not really moving forward.” People who become experts in their field have a high tolerance for that kind of frustration: Instead of giving up, as so many of us do, they use frustration as a spur to increased practice and learning.

Finally, people who engage consistently in deliberate practice eventually become their own teachers. They know where their strengths and weaknesses lie. They’ve become used to measuring their performance against established standards of expertise, or against their own best performances, and they have devised their own practices to improve their skills.

Athletes and musicians in training have coaches who can point out to them what they are doing well and where their skills need more work. Naturally, a book can’t provide that kind of individual coaching. But skilled writers are always self-taught. Long before the invention of creative writing workshops, writers learned their skills from the masters, through intensive reading and imitation. Consequently, the practices in this book are designed, not only to help you learn, but also to show you how to identify specific techniques in the work of professional writers; once you can identify these techniques, you can imitate them and make them your own.

As you work your way through this book, you will acquire a large repertoire of practices, and you will also be encouraged to invent your own. If you wish, then, you can select from all these practices and design your own learning program, customized to your particular needs. In becoming your own teacher, you will find your own way to excellence.

The “Be a Writer” Practice

To begin our journey towards writing expertise, we start with this simple practice. What is the most basic thing that writers do? They put words on paper. So when we practice putting words on paper, we are practicing the fundamental activity of being writers.

It's essential to remember, in doing this practice, that practice writing is private writing. No one will see these words you produce; you don't even have to read them over afterwards if you don't want to. So try, as much as you can, to relax as you write. You may find it helpful, before you begin, to consciously relax your muscles, one group at a time, or to take a few deep breaths. Perhaps you want to sit up straight or stretch your fingers before you begin.

Now, sit down with a pen and paper, or at your computer. Set a timer for ten minutes, or place a clock nearby but not directly in your line of vision.

In this practice, you can write anything. You don’t have to begin with a subject or an idea. If, as you write, you find a subject, you don't have to stay with it. You don't have to create a beginning, middle, and end. You don’t have to write lovely, coherent sentences and paragraphs.

There's only one thing you must do: You must keep the pen (or your fingers on the keyboard) moving, no matter what. You must keep putting words on the page.

This means that you can't stop to think, you can't go back over what you just wrote to fix errors, you can't let your mind wander. If you have to repeat a sentence or a word in order to keep writing, that's fine. If you have to write This is so stupid, I can't believe I'm doing it, that's fine, too. But you must keep writing (though there's no need to write fast).

And now—go ahead: Take a little time to be a writer.

When your ten minutes (or more, if you like) are up, gradually bring the writing to a close.

Now, without sitting in judgment of your writing, notice that for the last ten minutes you were doing what writers do: You were practicing putting thoughts on paper using words.

You can use this exercise, known as freewriting, in many ways: to warm up before you start work on a piece of performance writing, to get ideas, to exercise your mental faculties, to vent your feelings, and more. It’s great exercise for what I like to call “the content mind,” the part of our minds that gives us material for pieces of writing. (If you’d like to know more about developing your content mind, see my book How to Be a Writer.)

Now let’s turn to the other part of our mind we need in order to write: the “word mind.”