Practice Makes Perfect

Ignore talent, develop craft

Mar 08, 2024

Dear Scriptor,

I read an argument the other day which said that most people only have four really good personal essays in them, and that pretty soon any blog degrades to a public diary. While in no world does it seem reasonable to argue that writers are like printers and must be careful with how they dole out their essays lest they run out of ink, I too have talked often about how these letters can (and I feel too often do) degrade into diary entries (see here, here, and here for some examples).

Without a firm goal for each ‘essay’, the problem is perhaps insurmountable. I modeled these letters after past letters I wrote, while traveling abroad, back home to family. They were very well received and I thought maybe that style could recommend me to the wider world. But writing on a specific topic is comprehensible, writing a letter to a specific person (or a small group of well-loved family) is comprehensible, but writing a letter to a broad group of people some of whom I know well, some I know, and some I only know by name or email address — it all turns back into diary entries.

And I’ve read collections of diary entries which were fascinating. But those are a rare breed (even if they have more than four), and probably carefully selected besides. So let’s mix this up.

Hortus Proprius

We’re going to take a break this week from the Figures. Indeed, as I get closer to finishing the book, I’m going to share fewer and fewer chapters before publication. Sorry about that, but I am starting to worry publishers will be uninterested if I have everything (not that I posted everything) up online already.

So let us talk about learning to write. The hubris of writing about learning to write before I’ve published my first book does not escape me, but I am going to try and escape it by saying that these are facts I’ve learnt while trying to learn to write. As I’ve now published several articles and short stories (and written hundreds more, including these letters), I think I’ve learnt some things. At the same time, especially for those readers who are far more experienced in publishing than I am, please do correct me if I err.

There’s one of those self-help books that ought to have been a pamphlet but which is no less fascinating for that; it’s called Talent is Overrated. While his argument unsurprisingly boils down to his title, he takes us beyond a mere recapitulation of my favorite Anthony Trollop quotation: “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”

He argues that hard work is the key, but not mere hard work. Long hours practicing will not get one there. He uses the example (and forgive me, I’m doing this from memory so details will be wrong) of musicians in conservatory. There are those who practice six hours a day, and they are good musicians but will never be great. There are those who practice twelve hours a day, going through their pieces again, and again, and again. Doing scales they’ve always done, and doing those scales over again, and again, and again. Those hard workers will be great but not celebrities. The celebrities, the breakouts, they often practice only ten hours a day, less time than the more mediocre group.

But they practice differently. Instead of going over the same old pieces, they identify where they flub the score and brutally train those parts until they’re perfect. Instead of going over the same old scales, they make the scales harder or mix them up or do them without using normal, comfortable, familiar, fingering. You may know all of this, and, even if you don’t recognize my description, you might recognize this practice’s name. It’s called “deliberate practice”.

Deliberate practice is quite well known and well… (wait for it) practiced in sports, in music, and in chess. In sports, it looks like drills and heavy training for light work. In music it looks like what I’ve described above. And in chess it looks like the replaying of chess matches and the solving of ever more complicated chess puzzles. In the military, it’s drilling in conditions more demanding than the force is expected to meet in person; I heard a Marine and later a Navy Seal both describe being on patrol as almost a vacation, given how hard the training had been. Deliberate practice creates (or, let’s be fair, helps refine) geniuses. Or at the least it creates those who have in this, our modern world, taken their place.

But what does it look like in writing? I’ve seen almost no real investigation of this idea. Certainly it hasn’t been systematized as it has been in sports, music, and chess. Now likely that’s in part because writers tend not to believe their work can be “systematized”. We are still beholden to the Romantic Era Cult of the Artist. (I once heard it described by example as Kanye West complaining he wasn’t nominated for Album of the Year in a year he didn’t release an album.) But obviously the music examples give lie to this argument. If a man can deliberately practice his piano playing, he can deliberately practice his writing.

Although, the argument might still run; playing a piece is not the same as composing it. The creation of a work, it may be argued, is a separate realm from the mere mechanical playing of it. When we conceive of writing as some esoteric magic that happens, this may seem persuasive. But this too is to make us beholden to the Cult of the Artist. I’m not saying there’s no magic that happens, no Muse who inspires, I’m just with Henri Matisse who said, “Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.” Even in writing, we have our forms and our shapes, our short stories, our essays, our plays, novels, sonnets, ballets, epics, comedies, and tragedies. They overlap, surely, and there is play in them, but there is play in the playing of Beethoven’s Fifth as well. Our forms are no less formational for their fun.

Indeed, this is why I focus so much attention on the Figures of Speech. They are in microcosm what the forms of writing are in macrocosm. They are models from which we can embellish moments. They help save us from clichés, those bits of “heard language” which are the most obvious mark of bad writing and which are so numerous in some work that one feels as if he needs just turn on a light to see half the book’s phrases scurry right out of sight. Those who read Suspense and Romance novels especially come up against these critters, and their lot isn’t half (isn’t a tenth) so dismal as those poor fools — God help them — who must read corporate email.

While there have been some attempts by past writers to build up or pass on writing exercises, most notably Ursula K. Le Guin in Steering the Craft, I’d argue writers haven’t formalized (that sounds so much better than “systematized”, and indeed may be different) our deliberate practice because the very act of writing naturally creates the conditions for deliberate practice. Salman Rushdie or Martin Amis once explained (and no, you will neither get an exact quotation nor a video, for if citing two possible sources didn’t give it away, I can’t find the damn quotation), the act of writing a book is the act of learning to write that book, and, when a writer starts another book, he has to learn to write this new one from scratch.

Well, not exactly from scratch. What I (and Mr. Rushdie or Amis or some yet third person) mean is that each bit of writing is an attempt to compress into images and language a wholly new part or aspect of the world. This new attempt relies on what a writer has learnt from solving past needs, just as a man can learn from comforting one friend how to comfort another, but the men and the situations are different and will make different demands. So too with written work. Each new essay or story or poem is a new relationship. It will rely on many of the skills built over past work, but will always, always demand something new. And so the same effect musicians try to achieve by going over difficult passages in new ways, the effect chessmen try to stimulate when working through chess puzzles, writers meet in the very nature of their work.

So it stands to reason that the best practice I have found in writing has been the writing itself. I may have spoken about this before, but I once sat down every weekday for a two- or three-month period, and each day I wrote a new short story. It didn’t have to be good, certainly needn’t be great, and it didn’t even have to be long — but it had to be done, complete. With this method, I improved my storytelling ability by orders of magnitude. At the very least, I went from struggling to put two-hundred words together in a morning to being able to write about one-thousand words an hour. I recommend the practice to anyone who wants to write stories.

The selfish case for these letters is that they do for my essay-writing what that practice did for short stories. May they also be of interest to you, dear readers.

Flowerbeds

Edward Henry Potthast was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on June 10, 1857. After studying at the McMicken School in Cincinnati, he studied in Paris, then Munich, back in Cincinnati, and then Paris again. He spent most of his life in New York City, where he remained until his death. He died in 1927, a well-known painter of America’s Impressionist Age. Here are some of my favorites from among his paintings, all from about 1910; I can’t find specific dates for any.

Girls Playing in the Surf

Along the Mystic River

Landscape of the Shore (or, The Picnic)

The Shed

You can probably tell I’m trying something different this week. For a variety of reasons, I have not been altogether happy with these letters. So over the next several months I’m going to shift things up a bit. You see I’m shifting the format first. Each letter shall be shorter but the letters themselves shall be more frequent. So expect a letter next week.

Or, that is, almost next week. Because I’m also going to shift when I send the letters. Starting not next week but the week after, they shall arrive on Monday morning instead of Friday afternoon. Haven’t a clue if that’s the best way of it, but we’ll see.

Other changes will come. As I said back up in Hortus Proprius (the only main section, it turns out, of this letter), I will be sending fewer Figures. There are about twenty Figures in the past letters if you want to go read about them, and I intend my final book to have at least fifty and probably closer to sixty. But for now, you’ll have to content yourself with (like today) thoughts about writing. For those who enjoy my talk about the family, fear not. They too will come.

I hope you enjoy the changes, and please do tell me below.

Reviso et Peroratio

You can tell my friend and I were delightful children (and young – and not so young – adults) when I tell you that he and I used to laugh at people who warned us against thinking we were always right. We said, ‘Of course we think we’re right. If we didn’t think we were right, we wouldn’t think what we think.’ And there is of course some truth there. Many who refuse to argue, or those who cannot argue, or those whose arguments are weak end up slandering argument itself as a vice. But there is a difference between ‘you always think you are right’ and ‘you think you are always right’, and clearly what most people meant was the latter, or, said another way, ‘you hold your ideas too firmly’.

I still can. If you’ve been with me long enough, you’ve seen it in these letters.

In these letters, I try to capture a way of picking through life, through literature, art, and culture, which stands not in total but in occasionally radical opposition to contemporary life as most people live it. The biggest example perhaps is how both my wife and I insist on working from home, as well as not only the mere fact that we plan to homeschool our children but how we plan to homeschool them.

Our world abounds in riches which are free or cheap and easy to pass on and which we simply do not pass on. This astounds me. There is a way to read and teach which almost no one uses but seems in every way superior to what almost everyone does. I want to scream when I think too much about it. And yet (and yet!) if no one does it, then we could indeed be a small remnant rich in truth, or (and this is just as important to remember) we could be a cult.

Just because our world flows over with color while the outside feels drab and grey does not tell us all. Hold those ideas — hold them dear even, bu — loosely. I tell this more to me than to any of you. And so we end where we began: at this being a diary.

Thank you

If you write, what tricks do you use to help you? If you’re not a writer, is there anything outside of interest that’s stopping you? If you’d like to tell me (that or anything else), please click

Hortus Scriptorius

Discussion about this post