How the 1% Rule Applies to Writing

can you actually get better at the skill of writing I'm sure you probably feel like generally the answer is yes I mean you wouldn't be watching this particular video if you didn't think that but how do you feel about you yourself not just this vague group of writers but do you feel like you can get better at writing and do you feel like you are consistently making progress towards your goals of becoming a great writer over the last 16 months I've done over 500 one-on-one calls with writers now why would I do this well one is I'm kind of nuts the other is I'm the CEO of story grid where we help writers build their skills write a book and leave a legacy and my goal is to just to get to know other writers that are in this space and constantly be looking for better ways that we can help them because everything we do at story grid is based on this idea of breaking storytelling down to the point that you can actually learn it and my partner Sean coin he's the Creator and founder of story grid he came up with all the methodologies that I teach here and on the channel and at story grid.com and he's been in the publishing industry since he got his associate editor job in the early 90s and over his career in publishing he's had a ton of success in fact when he's worked on a book it's been 2.5 times more likely than the industry standard to go out into the world find an audience and become successful and what I'm sharing with you now is what he's discovered along the way about how writers actually improve because as I've talked to all of these different writers and I've heard about their goals and their frustrations and what they're trying to accomplish with their writing and where they're getting stuck and it pretty much comes down to two things first they know they need to improve we all know we need to improve at the skill of writing often we can look at our writing and tell that something's wrong something's not quite working but the second problem is that the general advice out there is just keep writing just get up every day and get your words in and it still just amazes me that this is the common wisdom across the writing community that the only way to significantly get better at writing or to get better in any measurable way is to just get your words in just keep writing and writing and writing churning out your words I mean why else would the biggest event for writers be nanoro where you're just churning out a 50,000-word novel in 30 days because this idea of just doing it over and over and over goes against everything that we now know about what it takes to build a complex skill like Writing Practice does not make perfect deliberate practice makes perfect so what is deliberate practice if we're going to apply this principle to our writing what is deliberate practice and how is it different from normal practice well for this I'm going to go to James Clear he's the author of the mega bestseller Atomic habits and let's look at what he has to say about deliberate practice while regular practice might include mindless repetitions deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance in the beginning showing up and putting in your reps is the most important thing but after a while we begin to carelessly Overlook small errors and Miss daily opportunities for improvement mindless activity is the enemy of deliberate practice to 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 this is exactly what was happening to me I was writing over and over and over I was getting up getting my 500 Words a th000 words a day in I was churning out manuscripts and I wasn't getting better there was no clear path from where I was to where I wanted to be as a writer this idea of just repetition it does doesn't work this has been disproven over and over and over that simply practicing a skill getting your reps in isn't how you get better okay so if repetition isn't deliberate practice what is deliberate practice well it comes down to three basic things the first is break the overarching goal writing in our case into individual skills writing isn't just one skill it's a collection of individual skills you can probably name a lot of these character development World building creating tension in your writing but there's others like making sure you have the five Commandments of Storytelling in every scene of your writing making sure your characters have clear objects of desire and understanding what veilance language is and how it affects your line by line writing so what we have to do first is we don't just try to write because writing is not just writing it's actually a collection of a lot of little skills and we break this idea of writing into these individ ual skills and we have to learn all of those just like if you were trying to learn to play the guitar it's not just playing the guitar it's reading music learning how to play individual notes how to play individual chords learning your scales learning how to strum the guitar tune the guitar all of these individual skills that go into what it takes to learn the guitar we have to do that same thing in writing so now that we've broken our writing down into individual skills now what we do is we practice on each of those skills and try to get better at each of those things so again we're not just sitting down and trying to hammer out a novel that takes us months and months or even years to complete and then finding out that from the first scene it wasn't working at all instead we take little tiny pieces of these individual skills and we practice those over and over and over getting better knowing that as we put these skills together this idea of becoming a great writer actually starts happening you actually start seeing quick Improvement significant Improvement so when we're looking at deliberate practice we're taking this one skill and we break it down into individual skills that's the first step and then we move on to practicing each of those individual skills that's the second step well what's the third step for that we're going to go back to James clear and see what he has to say about this perhaps the greatest difference between deliberate practice and simple repetition is this feedback there's two ways that James Clear discusses getting this kind of feedback the first effective feedback system is measurement the things we measure are the things we improve then the second effective feedback system is coaching one consistent finding across disciplines is that coaches are often essential for sustaining deliberate practice in many cases it is nearly impossible to both perform a task and measure your progress at the same time and I would argue that in writing it's harder than ever it is so hard to sell self evaluate your writing even as somebody who Inside Story grin has now analyzed hundreds of scenes it's still hard for me to look at my own writing and objectively analyze it so having an expert coach that can look at your writing and give you specific feedback is a GameChanger when it comes to improving through deliberate practice okay so you need deliberate practice you have to take this thing of writing break it down into individual Skills Practice ractice those skills and then get feedback from an expert coach in order to quickly make progress in your writing so let's look at those first two steps in our scene writing workshops we have an actual scene writing checklist it is the 13 things that have to work in your scene in order to make it publishable and these are the things that we actually check when we're analyzing scenes for our students and I want to give you that exact checklist right now so if you go to story grid.com checklist you can download our exact process and checklist that we use when we're analyzing scenes and I have a walk through of how we do that and I go through each of the 13 points and you can go to story grid.com checklist and that link is down the description as well okay so what about that feedback part well this is why we run our scene writing workshops and why I give away all our training here on the YouTube channel is because I realize I want everybody to have the information I want people to see all the different things you have to do in order to get better at writing but I also want to give you feedback which is why we have our scene writing Workshop so again that links down in your description as well if you're interested in getting one-on-one expert feedback on your scene writing we are the best in the world at that and I would love to work with you so go down and check that out here is story grid we believe in the 1% rule this is another tenant popularized by James Clear the difference a tiny Improvement can make over time is astounding here's how the math works out if you can get 1% better each day for one year you'll end up 37 times better by the time you're done and this is what we've seen I've seen it in my own writing I've seen it in the writing of our students is that writing is a learnable skill there are a finite number of skills that you have to learn in order to level up your writing and they're learnable you just have to apply deliberate practice break it down to those individual skills practice those skills and get feedback now if you want to find out more about story grid go to story grid.com check out all the free resources we have available there and make sure you sign up for the newsletter that's where we're sending out all the latest and greatest stuff and as always thanks for being a writer and thanks for being a part of our community here at story grid I'll see you next time

Channel: Story Grid

Views: 7,721

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Id: hgwTpeHIcz8

Length: 9min 52sec (592 seconds)

Published: Tue May 14 2024