Deliberate Practice

Let’s imagine you and I have just met. We’re waiting in an interminably long line for coffee, and it comes up that I recently crossed ten years of practicing the guitar.

A few weeks later—our friendship has blossomed—you come over to my house for a cookout and ask me to play you something. I agree, pull out the guitar, and what comes out… Well, it isn’t music. It’s a barely passable rendition of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” by Bob Dylan, and the only reason you even know that much is because I announced the title before I began.

Ten years of practice, and I can’t pull off one of the simplest songs in rock and roll.

Afterward, I ask you what you thought, and you feel brave enough to tell me the truth.

What do you say?

Probably something along the lines of, “I’m not sure what you’ve been doing to practice the guitar, but it’s not working. You should definitely try something different.”

This would make sense. Right? If I have been trying to learn a skill for ten years and could not perform in a proficient way, it would mean what I was doing was not working.

Apply this to any endeavor to learn a skill—dance, woodworking, violin, interior design, computer coding. If, after a decade of regular practice, I was not at least proficient, we would all assume that what I was doing to learn the skill wasn’t working. Something was broken with my practice.

I think that’s a fair assessment.

Yet in the writing world, we do not apply this same sort of common-sense appraisal.

Every week I teach live trainings for fiction writers from all over the world. My classes range from fifty students to over five hundred at a time. And every time I teach these classes, I ask the students how long they have been working on their writing. While a few are always just starting out, most of the people have been working on their writing for decades. Every time I ask this question, I get at least a couple of people who have been at it for over forty years, but the majority fall in the five- to twenty-year range, and almost all of these people have not written a publishable book yet.

Think about that inside of the context I opened this article with. Decades at this craft, and still not proficient enough to write something publishable.

And this isn’t because of some level of perfectionist tendencies, as in, they are actually really good writers but are just pushing themselves to perfection. No, their assessment of themselves is correct. They are not good writers.

Decades working on the craft and still not proficient enough to write a publishable novel.

I think it’s a fair assessment to say that whatever they are doing isn’t working.

How does this happen?

Why is it that someone working diligently toward their goal of writing and publishing a novel cannot reliably hit that goal? What makes learning how to write so difficult? And why does it seem to stand apart from the other creative endeavors as uniquely hard to do?

In 2015, the economist and psychologist Robin Hogarth published the paper “The Two Settings of Kind and Wicked Learning Environments” alongside Tomás Lejarraga and Emre Soyer. In this paper he lays out the explanations for two types of learning environments.

In kind environments, the rules are clear, accurate feedback comes swiftly, and the conditions in which you practice closely match those in which you will later perform.

Let’s back up to my example of learning to play the guitar. If, while practicing, I play the wrong note, it becomes instantly clear (to most people) that something is wrong. Alongside of that, if you are attempting to play an existing song such as my rendition of Bob Dylan’s classic, the rules are clear. The notes were laid out by him before I was born. Additionally, the exact same way I learn to play the guitar alone in my bedroom works if I am in front of a crowd of people performing.

This is an extremely kind learning environment. Thus, unless you have a mental or physical disability that precludes you from playing the guitar, it is relatively straightforward how you would go about learning the skill. Anyone can become proficient with the right kind of practice over a reasonable amount of time.

Wicked learning environments, as you might expect, are the opposite. These environments have feedback that is absent, delayed, partial, or—in the worst scenarios—misleading. It indicates you’re doing it correctly when, in fact, you are doing it wrong. Alongside of this, the rules can be unclear, confusing, and shifting as you go.

Think about learning the skill of leadership. The feedback often doesn’t arrive until months or even years later, when things are already falling apart around you. Worse, the early feedback is often falsely positive. The people you’re leading tell you what you want to hear, reinforcing that you’re doing well right up until the moment you discover you aren’t. Outside feedback isn’t much better. The experts disagree with each other, and their advice is as subjective as anyone’s. Additionally, the rules themselves won’t hold still. Every time the people change, the culture changes with them, and the approach that worked last year quietly stops working—with nothing to tell you it stopped.

You can easily go an entire career without learning how to lead. (You may have had a boss or two who fit this category.)

If we were to take Hogarth’s findings and turn them into a checklist for assessing whether a learning environment is kind or wicked, it would look like this:

- Setting match—Does the context of practice and performance stay the same?

- Feedback speed—Do you get feedback on your practice quickly?

- Feedback accuracy—Is the feedback you get clear, precise, and accurate?

- Sample completeness—Can you see outcomes of paths you didn’t take alongside the ones that you did?

- Rule stability—Are the rules fixed and clear?

- Pattern repetition—Do the situations repeat in recognizable ways?

Now let’s apply this checklist to the environment of learning to write fiction.

First, let’s look at the setting. This one gets a gold star. Whether you are writing well or not, it is happening in the same environment—alone at your writing desk.

Now let’s look at feedback because this is where things quickly go the way of the witch of the West.

Most writers go years without any feedback. They are writing and writing alone, reading their own pages, and trying to figure out what is going wrong. Often a writer produces hundreds of thousands or even millions of words before they attempt to get any feedback. So the speed of feedback breaks down immediately because there is no feedback at all.

Once a writer decides to step out and show their writing to someone else for feedback, where do they tend to go first?

Often they go to friends and family who, while well-meaning, are far from experts and whose feedback is overly praise-worthy because of their emotional connection to the writer. Right away, the writer is getting misleading feedback, which is the worst kind.

The next stop is a writing critique group—a group of other aspirers sharing pages with each other. The feedback is subjective, vague, and contradictory because amateurs are reacting to amateurs. The writer sinks further into the muck.

If, by this point, the writer is fed up enough to spend the money on an editor, they dump their seventh draft of a manuscript on them and anxiously await the verdict. Even if the editor is world class—most are not—and even if the feedback is accurate, it has broken the speed rule of a kind environment. It has come after months or years of working alone.

It’s easy to see how the typical writing learning environment fails on both speed and accuracy of feedback.

Additionally, writing does not have sample completeness. It’s impossible to get feedback on things you didn’t write. It also doesn’t have rule stability—while the rules are fixed, they are almost always unclear and seem to shift over time—or pattern repetition—each time you write, you are creating something new, even if it is a rewrite.

So if we step back and compare the learning environment to Hogarth’s research, we find that writers are attempting to learn in one of the most wicked environments that exist.

The long-term results of this are devastating because attempting to learn writing in a wicked environment doesn’t mean it’s harder to learn the skill. What Hogarth found is it makes it almost impossible to learn the skill.

In a kind environment, time is your ally because each cycle of prediction and feedback sands down your mistakes. In a wicked one, the feedback that would sand them down is missing, delayed, or lying, so the loop that should produce learning instead produces confident, well-practiced wrongness. The longer you operate, the more committed you become to a model that does not work.

What is a writer to do? If writing is such an insanely wicked environment, is there any hope for someone to learn this skill? How would you even go about it?

The book On Writing by Stephen King is the perennial number-one recommended book on Goodreads for writers. Most writers I talk to have read it—often multiple times. I want to draw your attention to two particular passages from this seminal work for writers.

The first is this:

“While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.”

Stephen King is making the assertion here that competent writers are born, not made. And if you are a bad writer, there is no hope for you.

There are two problems with this.

The first is evidenced in myself. In 2015, Shawn Coyne, the founder of Story Grid and the publisher of this magazine, started a podcast with me, coaching me on how to write.

I belonged firmly in the “bad writer” group. There is no way around this. You can still go back to the beginning days of this podcast and find my terrible, unreadable prose detailed throughout the years. Yet, somehow, I built up the skill not only to be a competent writer but a good one, and I was able to write the book The Shithead—a novel that has sold thousands of copies.

So, anecdotally, King’s assertion is false.

Then there is the evidence that Ericsson and others have laid out in the research on deliberate practice (more on this shortly). Across three decades of studies, the finding that holds up is this: Whatever natural talent exists in anyone, it is not what separates good performers from bad performers. What separates them is the type of practice each one engages in.

Which brings me to the second quote from King’s On Writing:

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

King goes on to give the advice of writing a minimum of a thousand words a day, at least six days a week, and this is the only way to ever become a writer.

This advice is given ad nauseam to writers. We are told constantly to simply sit down and write. If you have an idea for a novel, open up a Word document and start getting it down. “Writers write” we are told. The way to improve is to produce as many words as possible for as long as possible.

Yet if I had never played the piano but aspired to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, no sane person would instruct me to sit down at the piano and just start trying to play this masterpiece. No master woodworker would tell me to start my woodworking practice by trying to produce as many intricately carved rocking chairs as possible. No professional dancer would encourage me to start my dancing ambitions by practicing the most complicated piece of choreography I could find.

This advice—to daily produce words—goes against all of the scientific research (and human common sense) on how a complicated skill is developed. Yet this is the advice given—to read a lot of books and produce a lot of words. And, of course, this doesn’t work.

Any writer who has set out to do this finds they cannot produce a publishable work of fiction. After multiple failed rewrites, they give up and move on to a new book idea, which, after a dozen or so drafts, ends up in the trash bin as well.

What is the recourse for such writers? When writers hit the wall on their second or third novel, they finally admit to themselves that they do not know how to do this.

At this point, they start acquiring knowledge about writing. They study story structure, plotting frameworks and character development. They sink thousands of dollars into books, online courses, and masterclasses by famous writers in order to build up their knowledge of writing.

Over the decades, you see this same pattern show up.

Step 1: A writer sits down to write a draft. Maybe they get through a whole manuscript, but often they realize somewhere in the middle that it’s not working.

Step 2: The writer sets out to learn more about the craft of writing. They attend a workshop, buy more craft books, register for a ninety-day online course, or join a critique group.

After some time, their confidence starts to grow because they have built up new insights and knowledge about writing, so they move on to step three.

Step 3: With this newfound confidence, they start rewriting their draft. However, the same thing happens that occurred in step one. The book doesn’t work. So they go back to step two, and round and round they go.

This is the hamster wheel those writers who have spent decades working on their craft are stuck on. The same write→learn→rewrite doom loop has very little hope of ever getting them closer to their goal of writing something they are proud to publish.

Why doesn’t this work? Why does all of this learning about writing not help them gain the skill of writing?

Imagine you had never ridden a bike before but you decide it’s time to learn. So you look up books about how to ride a bike, you read three of them cover to cover and take copious notes on everything you read. Then you sign up for an online course about how to ride a bike, and again, you consume the whole thing, filling up another notebook with intricate understanding about how to ride a bike. Finally, you hear about a three-day course being taught downtown at your local YMCA by a former Tour de France champion, so you attend the whole thing and actively participate in the daily Q&A.

At the end of this, you know everything there is to know about riding a bike. You understand the intricate physics about cornering. You understand how gears work. You understand aerodynamics and the proper way to pedal. You have all of the knowledge you could hope to gain.

What happens the first time you get on a bike and attempt to ride it? You immediately wobble, fall, and skin your knee. And to make matters worse, as you are nursing your freshly bleeding wound, an eight-year-old child flies by you on her bicycle, effortlessly riding, hopping curbs, and even pedaling with her hands off the handlebars.

This child has zero of the knowledge you have acquired about riding a bike yet can zoom around the neighborhood without consciously paying attention to anything she is doing to maneuver this two-wheeled death trap.

How is this possible?

Because knowledge does not translate into skill. Learning about something does not turn into the ability to do something. Acquiring knowledge about a skill is completely disconnected from the skill itself.

So how do we solve this problem? Is there hope for writers to have a clear path to learn their craft, or are they condemned to wander in the forest of a wicked environment, hoping they are one of the lucky handful that the muse will somehow bless and move them forward to publishing success?

Is there a way to overcome the decades of misleading advice and transform one of the most wicked learning environments that exists into a kind learning environment?

It turns out, research is available for this as well.

Way back in 1993, a paper titled “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” was published by a Swedish psychologist named K. Anders Ericsson, working with Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer. Ericsson had spent his career studying people at the very top of their fields—including world-class violinists, chess grandmasters, and athletes—trying to work out what actually separated them from everyone else. His answer cut against everything we like to believe about talent. The people at the top were not simply born there. They got there through a specific kind of practice, which he named deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice is the answer to a wicked learning environment. However, what you have to understand is that deliberate practice is night-and-day different from the traditional sort of practice writers engage in.

A writer must try something different.

If you dig into the copious amount of research around deliberate practice, a set of conditions emerges that, when applied correctly, can turn even the most wicked learning environments into kind ones.

There are five of them. When all five are present, practice turns into skill—reliably, and for almost anyone. When one is missing, learning slows. When most of them are missing, you get the hamster wheel—the write→learn→rewrite doom loop that writers run in for decades with nothing to show for it.

Earlier I said that anyone can become proficient at the guitar with the right kind of practice over a reasonable amount of time. These five conditions are what “the right kind of practice” actually means. And as we walk through them, keep Hogarth’s checklist close at hand because each condition repairs something specific on it. What emerges, by the end, is not a way to survive a wicked environment. It is a way to dismantle one and rebuild it as a kind environment.

The first condition is to practice specific skills. Think about how a pianist learns. As I said, she does not sit down at the piano on day one and attempt Beethoven. She drills finger placement. She drills chord progressions. She drills rhythm and tempo. Each of those is a separate skill, and she practices them separately until each becomes automatic. Only then does she begin stringing them together.

What we think of as writing is not one skill. It is dozens. Dialogue is a skill. Physical action is a skill. Exposition is a skill. Showing versus telling—and knowing when to do which—is a skill. Point of view, setting, pacing, narrative drive are all skills that have to be practiced individually and purposefully.

What almost every writer does instead is attempt to learn all of them at once by writing a novel. Imagine telling our pianist she needs to learn finger placement, chord progressions, rhythm, tempo, dynamics, and improvisation simultaneously by performing Beethoven in front of a live audience. That is what a writer is attempting every time they sit down to “just write your novel.” A writer cannot learn to write a novel by writing a novel.

Hold this against the kind environment checklist, and you can see what it repairs—pattern repetition. A novel never repeats. Every chapter is a new problem, but a drill repeats by design. When you isolate one skill and practice it over and over, you manufacture the exact repetition the writing environment refuses to give you. It is the first turn of the dial from wicked toward kind.

The second condition is to diagnose against a standard.

Last summer I suffered a Brazilian jiu-jitsu injury and had to go get an MRI scan on my knee. Imagine if the tech had walked in afterward, squinted at the scan, and said, “Honestly, it looks kind of weird to me, but I’m not sure what all these colors mean.” I would have found a new doctor before I got my pants back on. A real diagnosis doesn’t tell you how your scan feels to somebody. It measures what is on the scan against a defined standard—against what decades of radiology research says those patterns mean.

This is precisely what is missing from writing feedback. Writing groups have no standard. Beta readers have no standard. AI chatbots have no standard, which is why they hand you a different, confident answer every time you ask. They are all reacting to your work from personal preference, mood, or whatever they read last week. Nothing is being measured against anything concrete. It isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a subjective, shifting opinion.

A fixed standard repairs two items on the kind environment checklist at once. Rule stability: When your work is measured against something defined, the rules stop shifting under your feet. And feedback accuracy: The assessment is no longer subjective, vague, and contradictory because it is no longer anchored to a person’s taste.

The third condition is expert analysis. You can have the best diagnostic tool in the world. However, it is only useful if someone trained is operating it.

Go back to my MRI. Imagine that after the results came in, the tech had said, “Hey, I’m really busy. I’m just going to have the patient in the next room take a look at this and give you their opinion on whether you need surgery or not.”

Can you imagine? I would have hobbled out of that office as fast as possible. You don’t want another patient giving you their opinion. You want a trained radiologist with a medical degree and years of experience reading test results and accurately diagnosing.

However, writers are so quick to hand their manuscript to a writing group of amateurs and ask for their opinion. The feedback comes back vague and subjective, often leaving them unsure what to do next.

When you have an expert diagnosing your work against a real standard, it fixes the worst part of the wicked environment. The feedback stops being misleading. Instead, it becomes clear and precise. It shows you exactly where you are erring and how to fix it.

An expert also fixes the problem of never seeing the paths you didn’t take. When an amateur reads your scene, the best they can do is react to what is on the page. An expert has seen a thousand versions of your type of scene. They know what it needed that you never wrote, and they can show you the version you didn’t know existed. Sample completeness—the one item on the checklist I said was impossible—turns out only to be impossible without an expert.

The fourth condition is a short feedback loop. Across every field the deliberate practice researchers studied—musicians, athletes, surgeons, chess players—one finding held constant. The shorter the time gap between practice and expert feedback, the faster the growth.

In writing, as we’ve discussed, the standard approach is to sit alone for months or years churning on a manuscript. At the end, you hand it to an editor and wait weeks for their notes. And buried in that hundred-thousand-word manuscript are so many mistakes that it’s impossible for the editor to address all of them. This is the longest possible feedback loop.

What the research says works is the opposite. Practice something small—a single scene, even a few sentences—and get expert feedback on it as quickly as possible, generally days, not months or years. Then correct the error before it becomes a habit, and practice again.

When you are practicing with short feedback loops, your learning compounds over time, and the skill improves. Long feedback loops keep you trapped making the same mistakes over and over. When you shorten the feedback loop, you fix another aspect of a wicked environment—feedback speed.

The fifth condition is a clear roadmap of growth. There must be an order to the skills you learn because some skills are foundational to others. No pianist attempts a complex run before learning her basic chords. No woodworker carves an intricate rocking chair before learning to plane a board. In every other field this is so obvious it barely needs saying: You master the smallest unit first and then build.

Writers do the opposite. They attempt the most complex form the craft offers—the novel—on day one, which consists of many dozens of intricate skills all happening at the same time. This has no option but to fail because this is not how humans learn anything. It keeps writers stuck in the weeds, unsure of where to go next.

A clear roadmap of skills fixes this. Start with the smallest unit of story—a few sentences focused on particular individual skills—and drill it until it is reliable. Then, once you have mastered the sentence-level skills, build up to writing an individual scene. Then a short story and then, ultimately, a novel. Each stage builds on the skills of the one before it.

This condition binds the other four together, and it does the thing Hogarth’s research says matters most. It puts time back on your side.

Notice what has happened here. Every item on the checklist that writing failed—feedback speed, feedback accuracy, sample completeness, rule stability, pattern repetition—has been repaired by applying the conditions of deliberate practice. None of the wickedness of writing turns out to be permanent. It was never a property of writing itself. It is a property of how writers have been told to learn, and every piece of it can be engineered away.

And remember when I said that anyone can become proficient at the guitar with the right kind of practice over a reasonable amount of time? This makes the amount of time reasonable. The writers who spend decades getting nowhere are not paying the true cost of the skill. They are paying the cost of the wicked environment. Put the five conditions in place, and the timeline stops being measured in decades and starts being measured the way it is for the guitar, the piano, or any other craft.

There is one more thing to notice about these five conditions, and it is the thing that convinced me they were not just borrowed lab science. If you have spent any time around Story Grid, you know Shawn teaches that every working scene runs on five commandments: An inciting incident destabilizes the protagonist, a turning point forces them to see their situation anew, a crisis poses a best-bad-choice question, a climax is that choice enacted, and a resolution settles the consequences and sets up what comes next.

Now look at what a single rep of deliberate practice actually is. Something in your work destabilizes you, and the drill isolates exactly what—inciting incident. The standard revalues the pages you thought were fine—turning point. The expert’s diagnosis hands you a genuine dilemma: Fix this, and it will cost you every comfortable habit you have—crisis. You act on the note fast, before the error hardens—climax. And then the drill halts. The skill is either captured, or it isn’t. Either way the outcome feeds the next unit on the roadmap—resolution.

A practice rep is a scene. You are its protagonist. The wicked environment is its antagonist. We did not design it that way. We found it there, the way you find a load-bearing wall—by leaning on everything else first.

Back in 2015 when Shawn and I started this podcast experiment where he wanted to teach me how to become a writer, the first thing I did was send him a single scene of writing. When we got on the call to record the episode, he asked me, “How do you want to do this?”

I responded, “Pretend you’re my editor and we are having a private conversation. Just give me the feedback straight.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, how bad could it be?”

Turns out, pretty bad. His notes on my scene were four times as long as the scene itself.

What neither of us realized at that moment was that we had stumbled, blindly, into the five conditions. One small piece of writing at a time—a scene, not a manuscript. Measured against a fixed standard—Shawn’s, the one this magazine is named for. Diagnosed by an expert, not a critique group. On a feedback loop of days, not years. In an order that built each skill on the one before it. It took us the better part of a decade to understand why it was working when nothing I’d tried before had. Hogarth and Ericsson had the answer the whole time. We hadn’t beaten the wicked environment. We had, without knowing it, rebuilt it into a kind one.

None of this is magic, and that is the point. Magic is what the writing world has always sold—slog away, produce your daily words, and hope the muse blesses you. Magic is unfalsifiable. That is why it sells so well and works so rarely.

Which brings me back to that cookout. When I played you my sad rendition of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” you were brave enough to tell me the truth: Whatever I was doing wasn’t working, and I should try something different. If you have been working on your writing for five, ten, twenty, or forty years without producing a book you are proud of, let me be brave enough to return the favor.

Whatever you are doing isn’t working.

And now you know why. It was never you. It was never a missing gift. That was King’s error. It was the environment. And environments can be rebuilt. Practice one skill at a time. Measure the work against a fixed standard. Put expert eyes on it. Shorten the loop from years to days. Climb the skills in order, starting at the sentence.

That is the something different. You don’t need my permission to build it, and you don’t need anyone’s blessing to begin.

You need a true sentence. Then another.