The James Clear theory of deliberate practise.

My mother sent me this fascinating article on deliberate practise by James Clear as I was planning out my writing schedule and thinking about productivity and it hit a couple of really solid notes with my analytical side.

While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.

- James Clear

This is exactly what I’m trying to do with my writing productivity so I dove in taking notes on how these findings could be interpreted across my writing.

The greatest challenge of deliberate practice is to remain focused. In the beginning, showing up and putting in your reps is the most important thing.

- James Clear

I would agree, which is why I’m trying to create a work-day schedule for myself and stick to those hours to in essence train my body into a routine of certain hours being ’work-time’ and others being ‘off-time’ and unless there are emergencies we respect those.

Mindless activity is the enemy of deliberate practice. The danger of practicing the same thing again and again is that progress becomes assumed. Too often, we assume we are getting better simply because we are gaining experience. In reality, we are merely reinforcing our current habits—not improving them. Perhaps the greatest difference between deliberate practice and simple repetition is this: feedback. The first effective feedback system is measurement.

- James Clear

This backs up the theories of Rachel Aaron that I mentioned last week : http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html

That the best way to improve productivity is to actually track how much you are producing. I made note that I want to experiment with how much I produce under different circumstances:

- different timed writing spurts over a week: 20 - 90 minutes with breaks in between for exercise.

- Writing at different times of day such as morning, after lunch, or late afternoon to see what is my ideal writing time.

- Note if different forms of exercise such as walking/swimming and stretching effect differently my writing output.

- Experiment with writing in a closed room vs writing when my husband is around and see if it makes a difference. That said I am very much of the mindset that I will not always be able to control my surroundings and thus training myself to work around others (perhaps with a noise cancelling app like nosily) can only be of benefit to me.

- Track the length of time it takes for all writing stages, not just drafting; i.e. Outlining, editing, and various stages of drafts

Deliberate practice always follows the same pattern: break the overall process down into parts, identify your weaknesses, test new strategies for each section, and then integrate your learning into the overall process.

- James Clear

I listed my weaknesses gleaned from writing ACOM and what I can do to improve on them.

1. Punctuation

As a dyslexic I do not understand the rules of punctuation at all. I used to just write nonetheless and hours were then spent correcting repetitive errors by my and my CP.

I have already started to combat this, I noted the errors highlighted by my PitchWars mentors and my CP and searched for simple explanations that made sense to my dyslexic brain. I typed those up and printed them out, I have these pieces of paper stuck to the wall wherever I am writing.

2. Structure and Stakes

ACOM suffered from the mushy middle and the MC losing agency halfway through the novel as well as in some scenes. Again I blame dyslexia. I do not understand, or am unable to properly think in the same way as other writers who study and have mastery of story structure. I write more intuitively, it feels alien to me to shoehorn my story into a structure. But feelings aside, I need to master this issue or else waste precious writerly hours correcting badly structured stories.

I am going to outline books 2 and 3 of ACOM in detail, and before I start the first draft, I will :

A) Read some books on story structure with an open mind (since I find that sort of technique hard to grasp as a dyslexic.

B) take the homework my mentors made me do in Pitch Wars ahead of time: reverse-engineer map story structure onto my outline to see if its hitting the correct points.

http://www.writingexcuses.com/2012/10/07/writing-excuses-7-41-seven-point-story-structure/

C) Do a chapter outline analysis: What is the purpose of the chapter? How did it move the plot forward? What was the conflict in the chapter? That is, a) what goal did the main character have FOR THAT CHAPTER, b) what obstacle did she face, and c) how did success or failure add complications/stakes/tension to the plot.

3. Time off

I wrote A Court of Miracles at such a speed due to intense Pitch Wars related deadlines. A distinct down-side to this has been the inability to see my own errors when revising/editing as I have had no time away from the novel and couldn’t see the wood from the trees. I hope that working properly according to a balanced disciplined schedule will mean I can avoid a lot of the last minute writing binges and back to back drafts, giving me time to work on another project to completely set my mind on something new and come back to the book with fresh eyes.

4. Physical Blocking and Descriptions

I hate writing either of these two, and developed a technique during ACOM to help me draft straight through and avoid having to be slowed down by them. I put placeholders and did an entire draft where I inserted these in one fell swoop throughout the entire novel. This worked well since I still hated writing them and thus was trying to be as succinct as possible to get it over and down with, which seemed to produce great descriptions in terse character voice. I also think that I should study both descriptions and blocking in novels I enjoy prior to that dreaded draft to put myself into the mindset that it is possible and not as horrible as I feel it will be to write them.

5. Intentional Reading

I read fast, and have started a reading challenge in 2017 to read outside of my genre. But I realise that taking ten minutes to jot down what I liked and didn’t in the books I just read might be very useful to me as a writer. As well as analysing what the author did that I’d like to master, and note any beautiful passages of poetry / quotes / descriptions that I can keep as inspiration for when I have to do my own descriptive drafts.