In this post, I want to talk about a few strategies that you can use to improve your writing skills. How do you do deliberate practice for writing? Deliberate practice is an important strategy in improving any skill. How do we apply that for writing? Yes, that’s what we will talk about it.
Deliberate Practice
If you want to know more about deliberate practice, I would definitely suggest this post. Deliberate practice is about practicing your skill with focus, intention, and awareness. Divide your skill into different parts and try to find the part where you struggle. Now, focus on that part with the intention to improve. The most important part of deliberate practice is the focus.
You don’t have to spend hours practicing deliberately. But when you do, focus for an hour or two. Take a break after that hour. You can also try to focus only for an hour or two every day on your deliberate practice of the skill. The human brain is fascinating when it gets boring. So, take that as a hint. Your deliberate practice can be frustrating, but it can not be boring. Take notes about your struggle. This will be your feedback about your skill as well as your practice session.
Deliberate Practice can be useful for any skill. As part of this post, I will share few strategies for writing. I shared some of the other tips for improving writing through my previous post.
Improve Writing with Deliberate Practice
Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, you can divide the skills into different parts. As a fiction writer, I struggle with details of settings and theme writing.
Here are few ideas that can help you to divide your writing into different parts:
- Character description, actions
- Dialogues
- Setting description
Now, find the writings of your favorite writers about these parts and try to write the same. You are telling your brain by that action about imitating. Of course, this won’t be your original work, or neither you own this work. You are imitating to understand the structure of the sentences, words.
Choose a character and now try writing yourself based on the experience your favorite writer wrote about it. Find the gap between what you wrote and what your favorite writer wrote. That’s the one feedback to find gaps in your writing. Practice on those gaps intently till you become good with them.
Deliberate Practice with Editing Feedback
Whether you are writing the first draft or third, once you get the feedback from your editor, make notes of areas where you are struggling. Look at your editor’s feedback about those areas. Use that feedback for your deliberate practice.
You can use the same strategy described above OR do a deliberate practice session of your sample writing with a fellow writer and get immediate feedback.
Two basic principles for improving your writing 1) Write daily 2) Reflect daily.
Reflection is important to become a better writer. Reflection provides an opportunity to find out what you are lacking in your skill and how you can improve on.
Similarly, deliberate reading is an equally important strategy for writing. As a writer, you must read. But then you should do a deliberate reading of your favorite authors to find out how they wrote their work, how they used different words and metaphors.
Conclusion
In this post, I shared a few strategies on how to improve writing by deliberate practice. How do you practice writing? Do you have any other strategies? Please share them in the comments.