The Power of Practice

My mother brought home a fascinating book that she got in the airport while looking for something to read on her recent vacation called Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin.  While the title is purposely provocative, I think a more accurate description of what it is about would be "practice makes perfect."  The book looks at how top performers of music, chess, and sports all practice, how practice effects their brain, and why its necessary to be truly great at anything.

Even if there's a lot of duh practice makes you better, the book does a great job of showing how a specific sort of focused practice works while doing the same thing over and over does.  You have to constantly critique yourself, evaluate your performance, and keep trying to improve specific pieces of it.

One of the most fascinating sections of the book for me though, was the section on Benjamin Franklin and how he taught himself to write.  As a teenager, after his father gave him a critique about his argument writing, pointing out what was good and what needed improvement, a rather normal sort of critique you might get at a writing workshop online, if you find a good one.  But instead of just using this advice, like I've done (to generally good effect), Franklin decided to chose several well-known and excellent essays above him in craft and use them in a fascinating new way to practice and grow his writing.

While reading the essay he would take notes on the meaning of each sentence, then several days later, try to reconstruct the essay from his notes in his own words.  The compare it to the original and look for his faults and how to fix them.  One area he found he was lacking in was vocabulary, so he rewrote the essay into verse next, then back into prose, and then again compared it to the original.  To work on organization, he would write each note on a separate piece of paper, shuffle them, and waited a few weeks until he forgot the essay, then tried to order and rewrite it as best he could and compare again to the original.

I've consider the idea of how to "practice writing like music" before and only came up with possibly sentence diagramming as something like musical scales (and then never tried it), so I was really amazed and pleased to read this approach.  There's a few problems taking it over to fiction.  First, the elements that make a good fiction novel are more widely varied.  Secondly, I remember what I really exceedingly well, so I'm not sure a few days/weeks would be enough to make me forget the actual way it was worded, especially when taking notes.  I've had to edit out sentences now and then from my work that sound too much the same to something I once read (even if it was unconnected and long ago).

Still, Franklin's method is inspiring.  I could design my own practice program doing something similar.  My brain is still humming about it… tossing about possibilities.  Sentence diagramming is still a good idea, but for plot, characterization, narrative tone, description, theme, symbolism, etc I'm going to need a lot more tools.

First though… who am I learning from?  Writing varies greatly.  I was stuck a little while, since I want to find my own voice, not just end up like writer x or y… but then I hit on it.  What I'd like more than anything is to win a Newberry Award, so what I should do is I should read all the Newberry books out there and pick them apart with my various tools, find out what make them tick.  While all very different, they all represent works that won the top award in their field, the field I want to be great in.

This week my task will be to figure out precisely what I'm going to do that qualifies as practice with each Newberry winner, and get a copy from the library of the earliest ones.  Then hopefully I can refine my learning program as I make my way through them and really improve some of my basic writing skills.  I do know I'm going to start in 1922 and work my way to the present, through all of them.   And I'm know I'm faced for some difficult practice ahead when that means my first book is going to be the dubiously titled: The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon.  That's certainly not one I'd have picked up for any other reason than this project.