How Deliberate Practice Can Develop Your Writing Skills and Talent

Saint Jerome in His Study by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1480)

Today’s post is excerpted from Deliberate Practice for Creative Writers by Jules Horne.

Do you believe excellence is in someone’s nature—an innate golden gift they were born with?

Or does it come from nurture—learning, effort, passion and commitment?

Of course, nature versus nurture is a false dichotomy. Born talent and learned talent—in any skill—can’t be separated. They reinforce and inspire each other.

But still, it’s good to examine critically the theory that some people are natural born geniuses in their field, while others get there through learning and practice.

Because one way of thinking is empowering, and the other is profoundly disempowering. And I definitely prefer empowering.

Let’s look at nature first—the idea that people excel because they’re a natural born star.

Well, it’s true that some people have enormous natural advantages in life. Maybe you’re supersensitive to audio and sound pitches, and become a musician. Or have an amazing eye and steady nerves, and try your hand at archery or wildlife photography.

And then, there’s your environment, which is immensely important for learning.

We all have latent talent for many things—writing, gardening, engineering, leadership. But we become good at specific things, in part because of the people and opportunities around us. Mentors, inspirational people, and access to practical equipment.

Bill Gates had a basic computer as a teenager, and spent hours hunkered away, learning how to use it.

The Polgar sisters had a chess-savvy father as their personal trainer.

If you’re a keen angler, you might have friends or family who go fishing, and nurture your interest.

If you’re a guitarist or drummer, you might have friends to jam with, and tips and musical inspirations to share.

Those extra factors spark your latent interest, and make you keen to learn more. So, it’s a self-reinforcing loop.

But maybe you’re on your own, with an unusual passion that nobody else in the neighborhood really gets?

Well, that can be motivational, too. Maybe you have more determination despite everyone—precisely because you’re on your own.

The poet Emily Dickinson was an unconventional recluse whose work was mostly unrecognized in her lifetime. Ray Bradbury was mocked as a child for his love of science fiction and fantasy. The painter Vincent Van Gogh was also marginalized for his uniqueness. The professor of animal science Temple Grandin was misunderstood due to her autism.

Yet all persevered with great passion and became outstanding and influential in their field, despite their uniqueness—or because of it?

Maybe if other people don’t helpfully validate you, you just get on with what you love?

Nature and nurture are so complicatedly interwoven with our individual psychologies and situations.

And in the history of education, the emphasis has shifted between nature and nurture, with each dominating at different times, as different research findings and ideologies come through.

During my teacher training in the 1980s/90s, nurture was dominant. The thinking was: Excellence isn’t simply an innate talent. It can be taught and practiced. This learning movement was influenced by the work of psychologist B.F. Skinner on behaviorism.

The focus was on learning through physical actions, rather than just mental states. “Skills and drills”, repetition and practice, were the way to go.

If you learned French at the time, you might recall the words écoutez et répétez—listen and repeat. I’m a visual learner, so it didn’t go well for me.

Try this
Take a moment to think through times when you learned effectively, and when you didn’t. What sort of situations? Was it quiet, noisy, calm, busy? Were you on your own, with a coach, or in a classroom? What senses were you using? This will be useful for when you’re designing your own unique deliberate practice.

But in time, the pendulum swung in the nature-nurture debate. At the turn of the millennium, influential books such as The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris and The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker reasserted a focus on nature.

Harris found that learning was more influenced by genes and peer groups than by the nurture of parents and the home. Pinker emphasized biology, rejecting the idea of humans born as blank slates and created by their cultural surroundings. Nature was back in charge.

However, the pendulum has now swung firmly back to nurture, and the importance of learning and practice. This still holds today. It’s a far more more optimistic view, and aligns well with new opportunities for bitesize and individualized learning online.

What led to this change? A big influence on the swing back to nurture was a research paper with the unwieldy title, The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. This study by Professor Anders Ericsson looked into what it takes to make an expert. And it might have stayed hidden in academic backwaters, if it hadn’t inspired Malcolm Gladwell to write his bestseller, Outliers: The Story of Success.

Even if you’ve not read the book, you’ve probably come across the 10,000 hours idea: that to achieve excellence in any field, you need to put in around—well, 10,000 hours.

The catchy number popularised by Gladwell ignited the public imagination. Maybe we can all become superstars, if we put our minds to it?

To me, it sounds both encouraging and impossible, so I’ve chunked it down to a more manageable concept. It works out at about 20 hours a week, across a decade. That’s about three hours a day, every day, for ten years.

At this point, intriguingly, 10,000 hours starts to chime with other time and practice concepts: Stephen King’s 2,000 words a day, every day. Ray Bradbury’s daily writing in the library, a story a week. Ursula LeGuin’s daily schedule.

The upshot is: it’s about putting the work in.

Of course, 10,000 hours of practice is simplistic. Not everyone who puts the work in achieves excellence.

There was an inevitable backlash. It’s a myth! I’ve been playing guitar for 40 years and still haven’t improved. 10,000 hours will never turn me into a shot-putter—I don’t have that physical ability.

But neither Gladwell nor Ericsson claimed that 10,000 hours of practice is a cast-iron guarantee of success. Ericsson simply uncovered a rough average time that skilled performers took to reach expert level.

And his crucial finding: it’s not about the number of hours you practice—it’s about how you spend them. Quality, not quantity. And the key is: deliberate practice.

Ericsson’s research showed that deliberate practice is a powerful learning strategy for improving performance. He discusses the psychology, the process, and, importantly, practical ways to apply it.

His findings are now a significant element of best practice in education and learning.

Do an online search for “deliberate practice in education,” and you’ll find thousands of sites where teachers are discussing the topic. Deliberate practice is viewed as the backbone of purposeful, systematic learning.

This makes it a great fit for individualized learning, for self-study, and for people short of time.

So many of the literary life stories we love to read are wild, exciting whirlwinds of romance, genius and rock-and-roll habits. If you love this, and find it helps you to write, great.

But if you’re skeptical, it’s worth looking into what might lie behind it, and how deliberate practice can help.

Try this
Invent your own muse. Think back to people who have inspired you in the past. Who lights up your life and gets you excited? Who challenges you with their incisive views and new knowledge? Who is a stern, wise critic who takes no nonsense and sets high standards? Who is way ahead of you on a similar path and is someone to look up to? Who makes you feel strong and alive as a creator? Brainstorm your ideal attributes, fuse them into a character, and have a conversation with them. You might start by asking questions: “What do you want to tell me?” “What do you see as my biggest challenge?” and writing what they tell you.

Try this
Consider the opposite of your ideal muse—your anti-muse. What sort of attributes do they have? What experiences have felt to you like an anti-muse? Brainstorm what you find. What can you learn from this about your needs? What relationships and experiences help you to thrive, and what makes your creativity wither? If you consider the anti-muse as a character, how might you transform them into writing gold, and loosen their power?

Try this
Set up an invisible committee of mentors. You have an unlimited budget, so choose the best. The people can be real or fictional, close family, media stars, historical figures. They don’t have to be friendly, or patient—any committee needs a mix of skills and viewpoints. Crucially, they’re all on your side. You might like to look into Carl Jung’s archetypes to discover more about the internalized mentor figures we all share, or draw on a mix of modern and older archetypes: the Sage, the Critical Friend, the Healer, the Rebel, the Trickster, the Innovator.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out the book Deliberate Practice for Creative Writers by Jules Horne.