The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Deliberate practice
Getting ready to write

When I meet writers who are beginning to work seriously, I recommend Geoff Colvin’s Talent Is Overrated (2008) and Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code (2009), describing the habits of high performance. Working hard is not enough: we all know writers who’ve labored for years on unsuccessful manuscripts that don’t improve with time. Coyle and Colvin outline the specific practice—Coyle calls it “deep practice”; Colvin, “deliberate practice”—that differs from simply writing. In deliberate practice, we engage in structured activities designed to improve our craft and overcome our weaknesses.

Colvin outlines five key elements of deliberate practice.

First, deliberate practice is “designed specifically to improve performance” and move us beyond our current abilities. We identify elements of our work that need development. We isolate one, structure activities designed to help us improve, then move on to the next.

Second, deliberate practice must be repeated.

Third, deliberate practice requires feedback about our progress from a mentor or writing partner.

Fourth, deliberate practice demands focus and concentration; it must be undertaken slowly for short sessions.

Fifth, deliberate practice isn’t fun. If the activities necessary for achieving greatness were “easy and fun,” Colvin says, “then everyone would do them.”

Coyle outlines three rules of deep practice.

“Rule one: Chunk it up.” First, engage in “fruitful imitation” to learn technique. For a writer, this might mean reading to understand a novel’s construction. Second, break it into chunks. For a writer, this means learning, say, how to write dialogue, describe place and time, develop character, structure a novel. Third, slow it down. Taking our time allows us to carefully attend to errors and learn how to correct them.

“Rule two: Repeat it.” The simplest way to degrade skills is to stop practicing. To improve or maintain skills, we must continually practice. According to K. Anders Ericsson, a leading researcher in the acquisition of expertise, most “world-class experts” practice “between three and five hours a day.”

“Rule three: Learn to feel it.” Deep practice teaches us to sense errors in our performance. The most productive sessions elicit sensations of “straining toward a target and falling just short.” We pick a goal; we try to reach it; we evaluate the distance between our performance and our goal; we work to improve; we pick another goal and repeat the process. “[T]o get good, it’s helpful to be willing, or even enthusiastic, about being bad.”

Lucy Corin, author of the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (2004), describes how she taught herself about the structure of fiction by the practice described below that helped her organize her novel. (She also deliberately studied image patterns and character descriptions.)

In one exercise, Corin compared her diagram of a page from Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (1951) with one from Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” (1933). Beckett’s page consisted of a single paragraph: it appeared dense and rich. Hemingway’s consisted of short lines interspersed with white space: it appeared airy. The pages depict “different sorts of worlds.” In studying J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Corin learned that Coetzee’s short scenes, separated by asterisks, made reading this book feel like “falling in and out of a dream.” Form, Corin learned, “is indistinguishable from content.” Corin then studied her work the same way and made deliberate changes to achieve her desired effects.

Corin suggests we engage in the deliberate practice of analyzing the physical layout of our pages. We can contemplate the effect we desire (density, thoughtfulness, complexity; simplicity, directness, straightforwardness) and then retool our work’s appearance to alter its meaning. As we revise, Corin suggests reading our drafts in a “dynamic and playfully analytic way,” just as we might read “a great piece of writing you are trying to learn from.”

If we want to improve our writing, we, too, must engage in deliberate practice. We must assess our performance, work to improve what we do well, and learn how to remediate our shortcomings. As one athletic coach told me, “If we work within the middle range of our talent, we’ll never excel.” Many writers stay within their comfort zones.

We assess our work, determining its strong points and weaknesses, and we set up structured activities to improve both. Let’s say that in assessing a memoir in progress, we discover we don’t describe place—we write as if the events could have taken place anywhere. So we devise structured activities to improve. We choose a novel or memoir that treats place brilliantly, and we study twenty pages, underlining instances where the writer describes place and its impact on character. We copy key passages—copying is an excellent device to improve our work. Then we analyze when that writer used setting and how it affects the work’s meaning.

We can study a passage describing place from Mark Doty’s coming-of-age memoir, Firebird (1999), where we find the following description: “We live on East Twenty-second Street, a busy thoroughfare, on a strip of low-slung cinder-block ranch houses where there aren’t many trees to absorb the heat. Some of our neighbors have given up on lawns like the ones they had back East and gone to tinted gravel instead.” We can then turn to our work and underline every instance where we describe place and note every instance where such a description is missing.

In studying how specifically Doty describes the location of his childhood home, we can learn how to incorporate a similarly precise description where it’s missing in our work. We can take time to deliberately write about place in our pages. Or we can write descriptions to use later. (My writing partner, Edvige Giunta, generated pages about Gela, Sicily, her hometown, before working to incorporate them into her memoir.)

In a memoir class I taught, my students’ works were consistently unclear about when events in their narratives occurred. To begin our deliberate practice of delineating time in our work, we studied Kathryn Harrison’s The Mother Knot and highlighted every instance where Harrison tells the reader when the event happened. On a single page, describing when Harrison weaned her youngest child, we found the following references to time: “By May 2002,” “twenty-six months old,” “only at bedtime,” “At the end of that month,” “All day and all night for a week,” “For a few days,” “a sudden June heat wave.”

As we studied The Mother Knot, we learned that although the memoir moves forward in time—it begins in May 2002 and finishes in March 2003—the narrative is consistently interrupted by memory, backstory, and reminiscence. These are clearly marked—“I was thirteen,” “My earliest memory of my mother”—so the reader knows when the events took place.

Students then studied several pages of their work and marked every reference to time. Several immediately understood they’d never told their readers when the events transpired. I next asked them to write a chronology of the events in their narrative and to decide how to indicate when these events occurred.

It takes daily, deliberate practice to become a proficient writer. We might not at first understand how focused our practice must be and how long it will take to develop our craft. As Colvin and Coyle state, we’re not born with talent; we find it through the deliberate practice of cultivating the qualities necessary for us to become writers.