Tag Archives: practice

Learning to Write Stories—Analysis or Practice?

What’s the best way to learn how to write stories? Should you just start writing a lot and work to improve? Or should you study the works of the best writers and understand their techniques before setting fingers to keyboard yourself? Or a combination of the two?

Image from Picjumbo

A writer friend enrolled in a literary master’s degree program and took a short story workshop class. The instructor told the students to dissect a literary work and analyze it. My friend discovered the entire workshop would consist of these analyses, and suggested to the instructor that students wouldn’t actually learn to write stories that way.

Picking a good metaphor, my friend said you can’t learn to build a house by taking apart other houses and studying them. You have to learn by doing.

The instructor disagreed, leaving my friend dissatisfied with that conclusion to the argument.

Let’s call the instructor’s way the ‘analytical approach’ and my friend’s way the ‘practice approach.’ (Note: I don’t mean to imply my friend only wrote and never read—this student objected to the 100% analytical approach imposed by the instructor.)

Who’s right? Both approaches seen to hold some merit, unless taken to extremes. A person who just analyzes famous writer’s works may develop expertise in analysis but never write a story of value. A writer who never reads seems equally unlikely to produce enjoyable prose.

I envision an experiment performed in two classrooms of second or third graders. One class simply writes stories without prompts. The other spends a year studying high quality children’s literature and discussing those books, and then the students write a story at the end. Which classroom’s students would end up crafting the best stories?

Imagine a line, a spectrum, with the pure ‘analytical approach’ at one end and the pure ‘practice approach’ at the other. My guess is, few of the great authors cluster at either end. They learned to write classic stories by some combination of approaches—by analysis and by practice. Perhaps an optimum exists on that curve, and I suspect it’s past the midpoint, toward the ‘practice approach’ end.

We might gain further insight on this by considering the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT. You may ask this chatbot to write a short story, and even prompt it with a subject, setting, mood, and style. The program will produce a short story for you in minutes.

How does ChapGPT do that? From what I’ve read, ChatGPT’s developers gave the chatbot many, many such prompts, graded the results, and provided feedback to the program regarding the grades. This seems analogous to the practice approach.

To produce a short story for you, ChatGPT scours the internet for information about the words in your prompt (for example, the subject, setting, mood, style, or other parameters you provided). That research seems analogous to the analytical approach.

Thus it appears ChatGPT learned to write short stories by some combination of approaches, someplace between the ends of the spectrum.

Note: ChatGPT does much more than write short stories. I don’t mean to sell it short. It also writes poems, essays, the answers to questions, and accomplishes many other tasks involving text.

In the end, my friend learned little about how to write a short story from the course. The analysis of classic short stories seemed, to my friend, better suited to undergraduate or even high school level, rather than a master’s degree course.

When learning to build a house, examining other houses helps, but so does building one yourself, and that’s similar to learning to write.

An appropriate mix of the analytical and practice approaches seems the best choice, at least for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 22, 2023Permalink

Practice Makes Perfect?

We know practice can help us improve our abilities in various areas. Yet many people believe they can sit down and write a blockbuster novel without any writing practice. Maybe you’re the rare exception who can, but most of us need practice.

Not just any kind of practice. Good practice helps. Bad practice not only wastes your time, but it also hurts by ingraining poor habits. This wonderful blog post by Barbara Baig inspired the one you’re reading now. She calls the two types naïve practice and deliberate practice, so I’ll stick with her terms.

When young, I played the cello. I don’t play anymore, but I enjoyed it while I did. Early on, before I learned how to practice, it felt like drudgery. My mom said, “Someday, when you play in Carnegie Hall, remember to tell the audience that you owe everything to your mother, who made you practice.” Sorry, Mom, that opportunity never arose.

Practice, in those early years, consisted of my playing a piece from start to finish. Once I did that to my satisfaction—a rather low bar—I moved on to the next piece. In Ms. Baig’s blogpost, that’s called naïve practice. Over time, I discovered an interesting thing. Whether in practice or performance, I played some passages well, without effort, consistently. However, I stumbled in other spots—the same spots, and the same sort of stumbling, every time.

I tried practicing a different way. I focused only on the rough spots, playing them over and over, then backing up and leading into them, then continuing on after them to ensure transitions both ways went smoothly. In this way, I developed ‘finger memory.’ My fingers knew how to play the difficult passages with less conscious thought on my part.

My skill as a cellist improved after that. I’d learned the secret of deliberate practice, and nearly all my practice time served to better my playing, rather than to reinforce poor playing.

What does this have to do with writing? Everything. You may be getting plenty of writing practice—story after story, novel after novel. But perhaps you’re not reaching a large audience, not achieving hoped-for sales.

Perhaps you’re putting in naïve practice, doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get better that way. Improvement might happen, but there’s a quicker path.

Use the deliberate practice technique I mentioned above. First, identify the stumbling points in your writing, perhaps from a critique group, or a trusted beta reader. You might also learn something from online reviews of your stories.

Knowing your weak points, assign yourself some brief writing exercises designed to work on those particular problems. Here’s a list of examples:

  • Weak in characterization? Flesh out a character in extreme detail.
  • Weak in setting description? Visualize a setting in minute detail, then pick three facts that really make the setting vivid.
  • Weak in working out plots? Outline the plot of your favorite story, or one you just read. What do you like about that story’s plot? In a similar way, outline the plot of several stories you’d like to write.
  • Weak in use of the senses? Take a scene from your Work in Progress (WIP) and put all five senses into it.
  • Weak in comparisons? Find three to five things in your WIP that are hard to describe or visualize. For each one, brainstorm twenty similes or metaphors you could use to make it clear to the reader.

They say practice makes perfect. You may never achieve perfection, but getting closer to that ideal may prove good enough. Deliberate practice may get you writing, and playing the cello, better than—

Poseidon’s Scribe

December 5, 2021Permalink