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How to Write Your Way to Carnegie Hall

You probably heard the old joke:

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”

“Practice.”

But we all know it’s not so simple. Is it?

A few years ago (using the rule that the 80s were 20 years ago, the 90s 10 years ago, and everything else happened 5 years ago) there was a meme floating around about the Ten Thousand Hour Rule, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers. He was quoting some research by Professor Anders Ericsson (who later wrote his own book on the subject with co-author Robert Pool, Peak). The idea was that it took 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill and become one of the top performers in a given field.

The problem was, 10,000 hours was never the point. No number of hours was any kind of magic number. Really mastering a skill could take much longer or much less time, depending on the subject. The point of Ericsson’s research was always about deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice isn’t just going through the motions over and over. It requires special effort, paying particular attention as you are going through your practice, always refining and trying to be better.

You can get better at writing, just like you can improve other skills. The key is deliberate practice. In fact, as an oft-cited example, Benjamin Franklin once employed such techniques to improve his own writing, which he documented in his autobiography.

How does deliberate practice work? What’s different about it? And how can I use it in my writing?

Focus

Deliberate practice is, well, deliberate and requires your focused attention. Break the skill down into component parts. Perform each practice session with a specific goal to improve one thing.

So, pick some aspect of your writing to focus on. That might be dialog or scene description, for example. More specific than that, you could focus on giving each of your characters unique voices, or trying to add layers of meaning in their speech. For scene, you might focus on engaging as many sensory elements as you can when describing the world, or making sure the tone of the description reflects the theme of that scene.

Find a book of writing prompts and exercises. Try to carve out one specific aspect of your writing each time to focus on. In your regular writing, you can also pick some skill to concentrate on.

Feedback

The next part of deliberate practice is feedback. You need to assess the result, usually as close to the doing of the thing as possible. How can you measure the effect? It can be difficult to measure some aspects of writing objectively, beyond pure word counts. Read over what you have written, pay special attention to how it addresses that aspect you were focused on. Dialogue? See how it flows. How natural does each character’s voice sound? Does each character sound uniquely themself? With setting, you can count how many senses you engage: sight, sound, scent, touch, maybe taste.

The language you use can have different effects depending on subject, context, even the reader, so there are many aspects of your writing which can be difficult to see on your own. That’s why it’s important to get feedback from other people–the ones outside your head. This could be trusted family, beta readers, or better yet, a writing critique partner or group of people who are practiced at giving feedback on not just what’s working or not, but why. (Being a good writing critique partner is itself a skill)

Coaching

This might be the most difficult part for many people, but it is also something in Ericsson’s research. Not everyone needs to join a writing Masters degree program, just as not everyone needs an Olympic coach just to improve their golf swing. Especially not at the beginning. However, to improve past a certain point, you need some expert advice. This could take the shape of joining an MFA program, hiring a developmental editor, or some talented critique partners in your writing group. Your mentor doesn’t have to be a professional best-selling author. The important part about coaching is they need to be capable of examining your writing at a high level, and articulating what the writing is doing, what is working or not working, and why.

Patience

While the idea of ten thousand hours being some kind of magic number is incorrect, time is still a factor. Improvement takes time. Sometimes you will see a great deal of improvement in something relatively quickly, just from focusing on it. Sometimes, you may go for longer stretches with only tiny improvements. It’s important to realize that even tiny improvements are improvement, and can add up. Be patient, embrace the moment you are in and keep looking for areas to improve.

Don’t be overwhelmed. Even practice takes practice. The important part about deliberate practice, like a lot of things, is take it a step at a time.

There’s really not an awful lot of writing performances at Carnegie Hall, but if you’re patient and steady, you could write your way to a bookshelf.

Michael Stubblefield
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Michael Stubblefield

When I got my bachelor’s degree—decades ago, now—I started out in film school, with aspirations of making it big in the movies. However, over the course of four years, I ended up taking so many writing classes that I had to change my major to Media Communications, with a Scriptwriting emphasis, in order to graduate in my target year. In the two decades since, I found myself drifting through several jobs that just paid bills. I have worked as a photographer, a truck driver, tour manager, and online marketing consultant. Finally, the most recent decade, I have settled for working as a software engineer. It pays well, and is something I am actually pretty good at. But I find myself longing to go back to the roots of what I really want to do—what my earlier college career should have told me I need to do—write.

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