Posted: January 28, 2022

How to Learn to Write

A client once asked me if he should use deliberate practice to learn how to write better. For those of you unfamiliar with it, deliberate practice involves isolating a skill you need to learn, then practicing it repeatedly with mindful attention to what you're doing. It's more focused than, say, practicing scales on the piano -- more like practicing a particular passage over and over, paying attention to what the music is trying to say. You're training your whole mind to this one specific task. It's a useful way to learn things like a more effective golf swing or the performance of a particular piece of music.

But it's pretty much worthless for learning to write.

You can't learn to manage character voice, build tension building, or use concrete details through repetition. Everything in writing connects to everything else, so even if you're writing a number of similar sorts of scenes, each scene has a different contribution to make to your story. You can't write the same scene twice.

Of course, you can rewrite scenes, often over and over. But even when you're on your fifteenth draft of a scene, you shouldn't be focusing on the skills you're using. What you do have to focus on is your characters -- who they are, how they sound, what they're thinking and feeling. You have to focus on your plot -- on where your tension's been building and where it's going, on what your readers are learning in the scene and how it will affect them. If your attention is on your writing skills, you're going to wind up with something mechanical when you want something organic.

So how do you learn to write? Well, speaking as someone who earns his keep writing about how you can improve your writing skills, you can read about it. Even if you can't learn the skills you need through deliberate practice, you have to learn what they are and how they work.

You can also see how other writers have used them. When you're reading a favorite author's work, you don't have to worry about how you would rewrite it. That leaves you free to concentrate on technique. This is especially true on your second or third reading, when you know what's coming and can pay attention to how the author is getting you there. One of the things that turned me into an editor was a habit of reading favorite books over and over. I went from getting lost in the story to appreciating how the story was put together.

There's a danger in this technique. I've found that, after focusing my attention on technique for decades, it's harder for me to simply lose myself in a good book. I still enjoy a well-told story, but I often find myself thinking less "Well, she's in trouble now," and more "Well, the writer certainly set that twist up effectively." It's still a pleasure to read, but it is a different sort of pleasure than what got me into reading in the first place.

I realize this is a little self-serving to say, but one of the best ways to learn to write is through using an editor. I'm not necessarily talking about a professional editor. You may have beta readers you can trust with your manuscript, and I've seen more than a few agents who were also adept with a blue pencil. And, of course, there's the classic story of Max Perkins taking Thomas Wolfe in hand (the basis for Genius -- one of the few major motion pictures where the editor is the hero).

Like you when you're reading a favorite writer's work, an editor can focus just on the writing skills you're using or misusing or missing. As you read over your editor's work, assuming your editor knows his or her stuff, you can learn the sorts of changes you need to make without taking your eyes off your story and character. As you make the changes you need, you can watch your story and characters improve. Passages you felt were somehow off will become clear. Problems you didn't even know were there will disappear. Your book will just be as good as you hoped it would be.

When I first apprenticed as an editor, lo these many years ago, my mentor and eventual co-author Renni Brown had me edit a passage of a client's work. I made the changes I thought it needed, then she edited after me, fixing the places where I'd made things worse and catching the opportunities I'd missed. Then she just handed me her edited pages. We never talked about specific techniques. It was just me becoming a better editor by studying the results of good editing.

And that's how you learn to write, by studying the effects of good writing. It's not a matter of practice. It's a matter of osmosis. It's not learning scales by repeating them over. It's more like choosing glasses, with the editor as the optometrist asking "Is it better this way . . . or this way?"