This past week, we’ve been discussing a concept known as deliberate practice. It’s such a significant topic that we’re going to continue discussing it this week. It’s challenging to overstate just how crucial it is, regardless of your creative career, to deliberately practice your craft. In my case, it’s writing.
So, what is deliberate practice? As we’ve defined it, deliberate practice is practicing something for the sake of improvement rather than enjoyment. It’s a key ingredient in creating mastery. If you can think of someone who is really good at something, chances are they’ve deliberately practiced it, whether they knew it or not, but since knowing is half the battle and almost 100% of the advantage, once we know how to deliberately practice, we can apply that to our writing in a way that’s going to accelerate our skill level.
We’ve already discussed how setting clear goals is the first step in deliberate practice and how absolute focus is the second. The third step in deliberate practice is immediate feedback. There are several ways to do this, and I’m going to discuss a few of those ways as well as how I do it specifically, but before that, I want to talk about what kind of feedback is actually good feedback.
Just like most things in life, not all feedback is equal. Rather than accepting feedback blindly, there are a couple of things you want to consider. Who is giving you the feedback? What is the feedback actually about, and how true is it? The best sort of feedback is completely true, completely actionable, and it’s about the thing that you’re currently trying to improve.
If you’re a writer, you’re going to get tons of feedback, and it’s going to come in all different forms and shapes and sizes. Probably 80% of it is just not going to be useful. The question is, how do we sift through all of the feedback we’re getting and extract the things that are really useful and how does immediate feedback factor into deliberate practice?
When I first started writing, I had the fortune of stumbling into a website called Royal Road. Royal Road, like many other websites, is an amateur writing website where you can post chapters and people can come and read them for free, and they can leave comments on them. This is both a positive and a negative, as it’s the internet, and so people leave all sorts of comments, many of them just completely unhelpful. But there were some good ones, and even in the bad ones, I could often find a theme where multiple people were noticing the same problem.
I’ve done videos on detachment before, and how detachment is probably one of the greatest assets a creative can have, and that is especially true when it comes to feedback. It was sort of a surreal experience to post stuff online and get people commenting on it. Like I said, most of the comments were just not worth anything. I’ve been blessed with a fairly high level of detachment, just naturally, but even then, I had to constantly remind myself, these people are talking about my writing, they’re not talking about me. Even if the feedback was worded in such a way that it cast dispersions on my character as opposed to on my writing, by reminding myself that, hey, this is actually about my writing and it’s not about me, I was able to create that necessary professional distance so that I could properly apply what I’m learning from the feedback without letting it crush me.
I think that for a lot of writers, especially new writers, that’s the danger. We’re afraid that feedback is going to crush us, that it’s going to ruin our motivation to continue writing. With the correct principles in place, it’ll actually supercharge it. When you see a piece of feedback that’s negative, you are the one who decides what you do with it. You’re the one who decides how you read it.
A great example of it actually just happened. I got a comment on my Patreon that pretty much said, “hey, I’m halfway through the Titan series and I really wish Seth could stick to plots. I feel like he just sort of loses track of where he is and he gets distracted and he goes off and does other things. He’s a great writer, but I wish he would be better at finishing what he started.”
The feedback is worth listening to. It’s clearly from somebody who’s part of my community and has read some of my work and it is actionable. If I worked at it, I could do a better job of focusing and making sure that I’m staying with the plots that I started with. The question is, is it true? Putting aside my initial emotional reaction of, ooh, I’m not so sure that I like that, examining what the person was saying and in what context really helped me to put it into perspective.
This person has read through the first six books that I wrote and so was making the critique based on that. I’ve written a lot of books since then and I’ve gotten better at keeping my focus where it needs to be in terms of my stories. But at the time when I was writing those books in the world of Nova Terra, that was actually a highly accurate piece of feedback. So while it’s not as applicable to me now, though it is a fantastic reminder to continue working on making sure my plot is tight and that I’m maintaining focus and not getting distracted from my original ideas, it was more applicable then than it is now.
I can take that piece of feedback and I can put it into the context in which it should exist and it makes it a lot more palatable. It makes it a lot easier for me to gain value from it as opposed to just feeling bad because this person said something negative about me.
Now let’s talk about feedback in deliberate practice. Immediate feedback is a huge part of deliberate practice. And if you can generate immediate feedback, you’re going to be able to accelerate the speed at which you improve. Why is immediate feedback so important for deliberate practice? Well, because the point of deliberate practice is improvement rather than enjoyment. So if you’re sitting down to write, the sooner you know what’s wrong with what you’re writing, the sooner you can iterate and fix those mistakes.
Deliberate practice is all about speed. It’s all about how quickly you can repeat the same action over and over and over again in order to improve it. We’re iterating with every attempt we do, but if you write a whole manuscript and that takes you a couple of months and then you give it to somebody and they edit it and it takes them a month and then you get it back, it’s now been a significant amount of time since you first touched the project to when you’re finally getting feedback.
This is why I like to get feedback on every chapter as I’m going. I’ve talked about this in another video, how I set up my funnel so I can get members of my audience to join my advanced reading team and give me feedback as I go. And this whole process of getting feedback almost immediately is just key in my deliberate practice.
If setting a clear goal defines what you’re doing and having absolute focus allows you to maximize your ability to do it, then immediate feedback is the jet fuel that propels you forward because every time I get a piece of feedback, I can factor that into my next attempt getting better and better and better and better.
Now you might not have a reading team. You might not have that ability in your career where you can get that immediate feedback from specific audience members, but you can join other author groups. You can put your content out into the world and just accept feedback. It just takes some mental fortitude. It takes being willing to not be good at what you’re doing.
I think one of the biggest reasons that people avoid deliberate practice is because it can be uncomfortable and most of the discomfort comes from getting that immediate feedback and realizing that maybe you weren’t as good at this whole writing thing as you thought you were, but that’s okay. It’s okay to not be good at it because you’re going to get better. The more you practice, the better you’re going to become, and eventually the feedback you’re going to get is going to start to change. The feedback is going to be, “wow, this is really good.” But that feedback will only come if you can put in that deliberate practice.
So commit yourself to the process, separate your identity as an individual with the identity of your writing, and understand that the feedback is about your writing, it’s not about you. And then get as much feedback as you can, as quickly as you can, so that you can iterate, so that you can continue to practice your writing, so that you can deliberately practice until your writing is perfect.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/E22GrrMr3tQ
Thanks for reading and watching.
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