

# How to improve

# your writing

Write Better Faster: 7 Practice Habits to

Improve Your Writing Process

Want the free audiobook instead?

If you'd rather listen to the audiobook, you can download it as a podcast for your favorite platform at engelwrite.com/thepracticebook.

Heads Up

If you've watched the "Writer's Practice Regimen" videos from YouTube or EngelWrite.com, some of this will be review. But there's also a lot of great _new_ stuff in here, digging into the specifics that the videos don't cover. I'd love to have you along for the ride.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Drill 1 – Write

1.1 – Copywork

1.2 – Short Form

1.3 – Long Form

Drill 2 – Read

Drill 3 – Get Feedback

Drill 4 – Study

Drill 5 – Edit

Drill 6 – Enjoy Art

6.1 – Consume

6.2 – Create

Drill 7 – Live

Turning Drills into Habits

Conclusion

About the Author

# Introduction

I'd traveled 700 miles for this moment. I'd fed myself with flour-stretched oatmeal for five dollars a day, slept in a three-bedroom house with 15 roommates, and trekked around the city with a bag of books on my back, which still hadn't healed from surgery. Now, I was sitting in a packed subway car hurtling under Manhattan, taping a contact lens to the front of a book wrapped in white printer paper. If they didn't agree to represent me, they would at least remember me.

That was the thought running through my head as I double checked the address and walked into the high rise lobby, as I dodged past the doorman and ducked into the elevator. Floor 17. I found the receptionist in a white room lined with bookshelves, and a minute later a woman walked out to greet me, looking annoyed.

"Hello," I began, introducing myself and offering her the wrapped-up book adorned with the contact lens. "I wanted to deliver my query in person."

Yeah, that's right: my query. The thing you email to literary agents to see if they'll represent your manuscript. The thing that creates the most important first impression you can make as an author. The thing where you self-publish a novel, order the paperback, wrap it in printer paper, tape on a friend's medical necessity, and deliver by hand ... right?

It was the climax of my big plan. I'd used my meager savings to move to New York City, mapped out some agents in Manhattan, and took to heart the age-old querying advice: personalize. Well, I'd gotten a little too personal. It turns out, as any cursory Google search would have told me, agents don't like being hunted down and ambushed. So I was rejected every time. But as I went back to my overfull brownstone and thought things over, I wondered if my insane, in-person approach was the only reason for my failure. It hadn't helped my chances, sure, but neither had it eliminated them—if an agent really loves a book, she _will_ represent it. So if my office intrusions weren't why I'd been rejected, what was?

Why do _you_ get rejected?

Why does an agent, publisher, or reader walk away from your work? If you're anything like me, you blame your query or your first page or the market, and you ignore the voice in the back of your head that has the answer.

Hi, my name's Mason Engel, and I'm the author of eight science-fiction novels, one of which I self-published and decorated with One-a-day contact lenses, and seven of which are locked in a vault in the basement. You have to be pretty stubborn to write a million words without outside validation, as I had, so it's no surprised that I ignored that voice in my head that was trying to explain my rejections. After all, I was already following the advice of the people rejecting me: I was writing as much as possible, and I was reading like an absolute maniac. But I still couldn't get a "yes". And I saw plenty of other hardworking writers with the same problem. It didn't make sense until I listened to what that voice was telling me: Your writing isn't good enough. You're falling short of your potential. You're not being the best you can be at this craft.

Hard words to hear, but I needed to hear them, and so do a lot of us who aspire to take our fiction to the next level, because our current method of getting better isn't working. Writing a lot and reading a lot are necessary, of course, but doing _only_ those things has left many of us at a wall of rejections and a flatline of sales. So how do you change that? How do you actually get better?

To answer that question I turned to my past, considering what I had tried, and how it had worked out.

My early writing career

I'd always loved fantasy novels, so I'd decided it was time to write one of my own. It was seventh grade. The words flowed quick and easy but 80 pages in, I realized my story was a blatant rip off of _Pirates of the Caribbean_ , and I put down the pen. I didn't pick it up again until my senior year of high school, when I needed a way to ask my girlfriend to prom. I'd set a high bar for myself in prior years, one year hanging Christmas lights that spelled out the question, and the next year riding up on a horse decorated with "prom" signs. So for this last go-round, I needed something better.

The answer came at the end of my high school soccer season, presenting itself in the boredom of my newfound free time. I decided to write. Keeping the old pastime a secret, I finished a novel, got it printed, and gave a copy to my girlfriend as a surprise. Inside the front cover, I'd dedicated the book to her and asked her to prom. The dance was the next day—the project had taken me right up until the last minute—but her answer had been a "yes" all along.

In hindsight, that first book set the tone for what my writing process would look like and what things I placed value on. Nothing mattered more than getting the book "done" in time to use for my big ask. Combining that focus on timeline with my Type A, productivity-centric personality, I became obsessed with word count. That's how I measured my success, and it made sense: writers write, so to be a great writer, I would write more than everyone else. During the next four years, I did just that, cranking out 6 full-length novels by the time I was 22. I self-published, fully expecting to be picked up by a traditional publisher and whisked away to stardom. The reality was different.

After my garbage fire query attempt, and after receiving a series of unfortunately insightful negative reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, I started to worry that I wasn't as good as I thought I was. I hired a freelance editor, and this thought was confirmed: I had a ton of bad habits. My prose was cluttered, my characters flat, my dialogue and setting cringeworthy.

I considered what had gone wrong. I thought I had done everything right. I'd read a lot. I'd written a lot. My ideas were creative. My parents were supportive. I had all the advantages that could have accelerated my progress, mentally, socially, economically, and still, after writing over a million words of fiction, my writing wasn't good enough to be published.

Before we go any further, I should be clear about something. I'm not saying there's some magical cutoff—measured by words or novels or anything else—past which you should expect publishing success. My disappointment after self-publishing had less to do with metrics and more to do with trajectory. When I realized my 2017 writing wasn't good enough, I compared it to my 2016 writing, my 2015 writing, and I realized I wasn't getting much better. _That_ was the disheartening part, realizing that I had plateaued in spite of all the work I had put in. And that was what caused that question to slip into the back of my mind: _Had I been doing the_ right _work?_

My research began.

The Writers' Survey

How do you get better at writing? That was my question, and I was no longer satisfied with the obvious answer: write a lot and read a lot. So I posted different versions of my question in 50+ locations online—Facebook groups, Goodreads groups, subreddits—and received over 1,000 comments. After responding to all of them I could keep up with, I grouped them into seven recurring suggestions, each answering the question of how to get better at writing:

  1. Write

  2. Read

  3. Get Feedback

  4. Study

  5. Edit

  6. Enjoy Art

  7. Live

I call them the 7 Drills. They're all you need. You can stop dreaming about your books in Barnes & Noble. You can stop counting your rejection letters from agents. You can make your writing great, and you can be published. The key is to perform these 7 Drills.

But maybe you already do the 'drills' and there's nothing groundbreaking or magical about them. You just know if you practice for 10,000 hours you'll be an expert. But what if the _way_ you practice matters more than the hours you put in?

Recent studies in expertise science show that it doesn't matter how many hours you pursue your normal practice methods. After you reach an acceptable level of performance at a task, doing that task over and over again does _not_ make you better. In one study, researchers discovered that doctors with 20 years of experience perform no better than doctors with 5 years of experience; that _teachers_ with 20 years of experience perform no better than _teachers_ with 5 years of experience; and that _drivers_ with 20 years of experience perform no better than _drivers_ with 5 years of experience. Our skills deteriorate to amateur levels if we use them only on autopilot. So, what's the answer?

The Secret Sauce

The key ingredient to becoming an expert—and the one most of us leave out—is called deliberate practice. It's a subject I've studied extensively with books like "Peak" and "Mastery", and with training methodologies like the Suzuki method for violin, and Ben Franklin's self-apprenticeship for writing. I've combined this research with my own experience writing my eight novels, and I've created a deliberate-practice version of the 7 Drills to guide you toward mastery. So even though the Drills seem unextraordinary now, they'll be life-changing in the right context, and will make a huge difference in your progress as a writer.

I highly recommend reading "Peak" for a full explanation of deliberate practice, but for now, we'll go through the seven main principles you'll need.

  1. A field that's highly developed, and a teacher to help you navigate it

    * Novel writing is still a relatively young art form, but it's a very developed field with concrete skills and components you can practice, so we're good there. As for a teacher, if you'll give me a shot, I know I can guide you through an effective framework.

  2. A willingness to leave your comfort zone

  3. A specific goal with hyper-targeted aspects of performance

  4. Concentration and intention.

  5. Feedback, both external and self-given

  6. Clear and evolving mental representations—kind of like intuitive understandings of what works, both for the writing process as a whole and for its components

  7. A system of skill layering so you can build skills on top of one another.

For our purposes, we'll take #1 as a guarantee, and we'll save #3 and #7 for the last chapter. The principles that remain will be our focus throughout.

The most important takeaway of this book

If you get only one thing out of this book, let it be this:

Deliberately practicing the 7 Drills + writing = the fastest way to improve your fiction

That's it. If you consistently work on the 7 Drills with a deliberate practice mindset, and you continue writing the stories/novels you hope to get published, you WILL get better at writing. Let's say it again.

DP Drills + writing = fastest improvement

I spend the bulk of this book clarifying how to integrate deliberate practice into the 7 Drills, and I spend the final section recommending ways to make the 7 Drills a habit alongside your usual writing. Let's see that equation one more time.

DP Drills + writing = fastest improvement

Not convinced?

Most of the folks who disagree with the necessity of practice have one of two beliefs: "You're wrong about practice; it can't produce greatness; greatness comes from innate talent"; and/or "The idea of deliberate practice is over-complicated; getting better at writing should be more organic, intuitive, and done by feel". I won't attempt to change either of these beliefs, but I do want to challenge you with a few questions

"Greatness comes from innate talent."

What's easier to believe, that our less-than-great skill is determined by an external force, or that it's determined by our lack of effort? In the former case, we can shift the blame to someone or something else. We become victims, and we excuse ourselves for our lack of greatness. In the latter case we take responsibility. If we fail at greatness, it's on us. So be careful: by believing that innate talent wholly predicts success, you might just be letting yourself off the hook.

If you're open to exploring other viewpoints, I recommend you read _Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise_. Through a series of case studies on so-called "prodigies", Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool present a compelling case against innate talent. Greatness in a field, they argue, is attainable only through a certain kind of practice.

"A practice framework is overcomplicated; writing should be done by feel."

The need for a practice framework could vary depending on your personality, but I have a hunch it's valuable no matter what. There are two reasons why.

First, a "simpler" approach to getting better, one that relies on "common sense", has a fatal flaw: it relies on common sense. It's intuitive that we need to read and write and get feedback and learn from other writers and revise our work and be alive and appreciate other art forms. But as we've already seen, _I_ didn't have that intuition when I first started, and I'm sure a lot of other writers don't either. Maybe you do—that's great—but I think you'll still find this book valuable (see the paragraph below ).

The second reason not to shy away from a practice framework is that the framework is crazy simple. The methodology outlined in this book was born of exhaustive research—books, surveys, case studies, my own experience—but all that stuff is the bottom part of the iceberg. It's important and interesting and supports everything else, but at the end of the day, it's all underwater. We'll be focusing on more actionable things, the tip of the iceberg, carving with our little writer chisels to make beautiful ice sculpture books.

Okay, that metaphor got away from me a little bit, but hopefully you get my drift (like an iceberg HAHA ... fine, I'll stop).

Jokes aside, there's only one reason you should follow the 7 Drill practice system: it works.

Where's the proof?

In the chapters to come, we'll read short Q&As about how big time bestsellers have leveraged each of the 7 Drills, how folks like Andy Weir, Jodie Picoult, Romina Russel, and Gregg Olsen have applied the drills in their own writing. But these methods work for authors of all types and at all stages. Many folks, after watching the video series I began this system with, have already found success. Below are just a couple of examples. (I would love to hear from you about your successes—or struggles—with the practice method! My email is mason@engelwrite.com )

"With writing, I've always thought you either have it or you don't, so I never thought of practicing. After going through the Practice Regimen, I realized I didn't have to settle for my current skill level. The Training Sheets gave me an actionable system to start improving. Now, I write faster, cleaner, and with more joy. The 7 Drills have opened up a whole new dimension of my fiction."

-Kent Wayne, Amazon-bestselling author of the Echo Series

"After surveying the working methods of over 1,000 writers and researching best writing process techniques in available literature, Mason has distilled that information into a very solid, practical, clear, and accessible approach to writing."

-Steve Adams, Pushcart-winning author and writing coach

The structure of this book

The chapters that follow give a detailed breakdown of the 7 Drills. Two of the 7 Drills, "Write" and "Enjoy Art", have sub-drills. "Write" is broken into three sub-drills: copywork, short form, and long form. And "Enjoy Art" is broken into two sub-drills: consume and create. I wanted to give you a heads up for when you realize, depending on how you count them, there could actually be ten drills instead of seven. Frankly, seven just sounds better. It's a powerful number ... wonders of the world, days of the week, horcruxes, lot of stuff. And the categorization seems neater that way 

We begin each chapter by describing the drill (or sub-drill) in the context of deliberate practice. Then, through a personal account of my own practice, we see the most efficient way to apply the drill. And finally, we walk through a Q&A about the drill with a bestselling author. Only after we have a firm grasp on each of our seven secret weapons do we move on to the final section of the book, in which we become crystal clear on _how_ to start practicing.

But enough preamble. Hopefully you're ready to take your craft to the next level, to be confident in your stories, to get "yes"s from agents and publishers or more downloads on Amazon. I want to help you do that. Genuinely. I'm not a talking head giving advice from the outside. I'm in the trenches with you, experimenting with this method myself to improve my own writing, so I'm invested in how well it works, and I'm truly determined to help you reach your potential.

Now, without further ado, let's dive into the deliberate-practice approach to the 7 Drills.

#

#

# Drill 1.1 – Write (copywork)

internalize style through imitation

A young Ben Franklin dreamed of becoming a writer, but he didn't have the education that would have made that dream easily possible, and he wasn't satisfied by the strategy of just writing and reading as much as he could—he knew he couldn't develop a compelling, persuasive style in a vacuum. So he got an apprenticeship at his brother's printing shop, he took articles from the newspaper, and he started copying them by hand.

Ben Franklin isn't the only writer to have done this—numerous others in the survey said they do something similar, hand copying passages from their favorite novels or stories as a way to absorb the author's style. According to our principles of deliberate practice, though, there are some things we should keep in mind to make the most of the activity.

First, you need to concentrate (throughout the text, for emphasis, I'll underline every principle of deliberate practice). Instead of mindlessly transferring the passage from one page to another, you should pay close attention to the writing. Instead of reading a word and copying it, reading a word and copying it, try reading a sentence and copying that. This forces you to see the forest from the trees, the style the author is employing in addition to the words she's constructing it with, and it will increase your absorption/retention.

While doing copy work, you should also focus on evolving your mental representations. (To review: "mental representation" is a fancy term to describe our understanding of something. Because I've read a lot of sci-fi, I have a pretty clear mental representation of what makes a good sci-fi novel. And because I'm not an engineer, I do _not_ have a clear mental representation of what makes an efficient engine. If the concept isn't 100% clear, don't worry. It'll become more intuitive in the coming chapters.) By recreating the work of another author piece by piece, you begin to understand how the pieces cohere into a whole, like taking apart a clock and putting it back together. And slowly, after doing enough of this, you can build a mental representation not only of how good prose should flow, but for how good stories should flow.

Of course, the concern is that stories you tell in the future will be unoriginal, that they'll be imitations ... copies.

But I think that's a really ambitious way of looking at it. If I hand copy _Ulysses_ word for word and then write a novel of my own, I don't think anyone is going to mistake me for James Joyce. Because we're all wired differently. The influences on our creativity are so diverse and unique that we couldn't be another writer if we tried.

Ben Franklin knew this, and after copying articles from other writers, he began writing his own pieces. Under one pseudonym he wrote in one style, and under other pseudonyms he wrote in vastly different styles, all of which were distinct from the authors he'd learned from. So his copy work actually increased, rather than limited, his uniqueness as a writer.

But look, it's not as if you have to make this an obsession like Ben Franklin did, and you definitely shouldn't copy all 300,000 words of _Ulysses_. Just choose your favorite book and flip to the first page. Copy 100 words (for the greatest effect, copy the words two or three times). Worst case scenario you've lost 10 minutes. Best case? You start absorbing the style of a great author.

My experience with the drill

My background with copywork

Be original, they said. Find your voice. Be uniquely yourself without copying anyone because we all have a distinct artistic style. That's the advice I got, and I agreed with all of it. But sometimes, "finding my voice" felt like inventing a new color. Then I learned about copywork, and instead of inventing colors, I started mixing them.

I chose a method

But I guess I should back up. I didn't start right away. First I had to decide what I wanted to get out of the process: a concise and resonant style of description. And then I had to choose a method: word-for-word copying. (Other copywork methods include logical reconstruction and memorized reproduction. For our purposes, word-for-word is the most relevant, so I won't waste space with the others here.) The next question was: what should I copy word for word?

I chose a source

When thinking of writers whose description had the qualities I wanted to develop in my own writing (therefore adding those qualities to my MR—mental representation—of good description), I lighted upon Joseph Conrad. What better Conrad to copy than _Heart of Darkness_? It's dense with description, poignant, precise, and chilling. I figured I would flip through every page, choose the descriptive passages, and start copying.

I copied. And I copied.

Some passages I copied only once. Others, the ones I really liked, I copied twice or three times. It was crazy how quickly the words felt natural the second or third go, and how my mind state changed afterward—all I wanted to write were haunting, slow-drifting tales of dark journeys.

I don't like taking notes in a book, so I chose my passages in advance,  
noted them in my journal, and then copied

A few things helped me get the most out of the process. First, I memorized as much as possible while doing the actual copying. So I was reading sentences and copying them without looking back at the text, as opposed to doing single words or phrases. This method forced me to concentrate and inhabit the flow of the piece, therefore engraving it deeper into my MR of good prose. Also, I copied for only 20 minutes at a time. You wouldn't believe how quickly copying can burn you out (I should mention, by the way, that I'm talking about *hand* copying here—I have a hunch that typing has similarly tactile benefits, but let's play it safe, shall we?) And finally, I re-read what I had copied as a way of cementing the material into my mind and tricking myself into thinking I could write at that level.

I freewrote

The copying was beneficial in and of itself, but I wanted to get the most out of it as possible. So I took the training wheels off; I wrote something original. Not a short story or chapter of a novel, but a completely open-ended, open-minded stream of consciousness piece. And not only that. I concentrated on writing in the style I had been copying in: Conrad's (which, coincidentally, is why I won't share the final product of that freewriting—I told you I was in a dark state of mind :P ). This final step helped reinforce the evolution of my MR of Conrad's style.

Reflections

Your writing voice is developed by reading, stealing, tweaking, and reimagining the voices of other writers. Not to borrow style is to lock yourself in a room and talk only to yourself. You may think your voice is original, but only because you don't know who you sound like.

The bestseller interview – Ben Franklin

_In this section of each chapter, we'll hear from a bestseller in the form of a Q &A. For this first Q&A, in honor of writing in the style of other authors, I'll answer on behalf of ole Ben. If you think this is unconscionably presumptuous, you're right. But relax. If I can fail in public to sound like Ben Franklin, you can fail in private to sound like an author_ you _admire._

The answer to question number two is an excerpt from Benjamin Franklin's autobiography

Have you ever consciously thought about "practicing" your writing?

I take with no small concern your question and the doubt of hard work it exposes. Have I practiced my writing? Has the blacksmith practiced his smithing? The cobbler his cobbling? But of course you see your error, and perhaps your question was so formed only to bait my response. Never minding your motivation, I offer you nothing but Truth.

My thoughts of honing this craft have ever been conscious—so they are now as I dip this quill. So too were they as I entered my brother's printing shop, at my father's behest, as an apprentice. Thought he that my hands would be stained black from the presses. Thought I they would be stained from words of my own. What, then, did I do? What else could I, but follow the steps of the authors I printed? If _theirs_ was the path I would follow, I would learn their craft from _their_ pens. Aided by (I regret to say it) hands too fast and too poor to pay, I thieved paper and ink from my dear brother, and I set to work reproducing nigh every article we printed, transferring the words with those fast hands, which increasingly grew steady and sure on the quill, from printed page to stolen scrap. At length this transferal produced in me an ability to write articles of my own, albethey under false names.

When you've done copywork, what did you copy, and how did you go about the process (did you copy word for word? multiple times? etc.)?

"I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come hand. Then I compared my _Spectator_ with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them.

But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them. Therefore I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again.

I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language." (Excerpt from Franklin's autobiography.)

Why did you copy the way you did? What were you trying to accomplish as a result?

If you draw horses for a journey to the West, whose direction do you follow, the West man or the East one? It was the same for me, only I had not the privilege of asking these Writing men for their directions—I could but trace their paths across the page. Therefore, in my method of copy, I endeavored to recreate the thoughts of each author, to see through his eyes that I might sharpen my own vision, to add his prose in my ever stewing pot as a flavor to sip from. In the end this stew boiled vibrant and tasteful onto my papers, and you would never know all the ingredients I had added.

Conclusion

All right, I'm me again. Thankest thou for thy patience in the face of thine pr'sumption.

Yikes. Sorry, Ben.

Anyway, we've just covered one of the easiest ways to polish the foundation of your craft. Copying will start improving your conception of good writing the second your pen hits the page. Easy right?

If you're still a little unclear on how to get started, feel free to download the "Write (copywork)" Training Sheet. It's a PDF guide that will walk you through the drill with specific action steps, and that, as a bonus, is written with no attempt at the voice of Ben Franklin. You can get the PDF for free at engelwrite.com/trainingsheets.

**Heads up:** Two things. First, you're going to be seeing a lot of that link throughout this book. I know it'll get annoying, and I'm sorry for that, but the Training Sheets will make this system a TON easier for you, so I want to make sure you don't forget them. With that in mind, please forgive my recurring mentions 

Second, the Training Sheet link takes you to a page that asks for your email. Yeah, I know, the whole opt-in rigmarole is getting old, but it's the best way I could think of to send you more specific tips and keep you motivated/accountable for your practice. If you want no part of that, it's totally cool to subscribe, download the goods, and unsubscribe. Just know you'll be missing out on some content that could be helpful . Whatever the case, subbed or unsubbed, I promise your information is safe with me.

And now, back to our regular programming.

#

# Drill 1.2 – Write

# (short form)

avoid the time waste of unfocused writing

I had never written anything shorter than 90,000 words. And then I started the Writers' Survey. Over and over again, writers told me I should write short stories, and that doing so would dramatically accelerate my progress in the craft.

Fan fiction was an oft' touted short form (sorry, I have Lingering Ben Syndrome). Fan fic allows you to inhabit another author's world in a way that reading doesn't. Operating _within_ the world and using the pieces the author created, you gain a deeper understanding of how the original story was put together, and you can start evolving your mental representation of a good story—building an intuition for good writing. So eventually, people will be writing fan fiction of _your_ work

Original short stories came even more highly recommended. The bitesize nature of a short story allows you to maintain concentration, ideally honing in on one thing per story (dialogue, description, etc.). Because of your narrowed focus, and because you only have to keep it up for a few thousand words, you have free license to experiment, to leave your comfort zone and try a different style, approach, or method. Besides that, shorts are simply easier to get feedback on than long form. They're faster to read and digest and critique than an entire novel, and the concentration you put into a piece doesn't matter unless you can evaluate how effective the end result was.

But I know how this sounds to those of you who dream of selling novels. Doesn't writing short stories take away from the time you could be spending on your manuscript? Maybe, but in the end, it makes your manuscript even better.

Take Stephen King as an example. He got his start with short stories, dozens of short stories that allowed him to hone his craft before his debut novel, _Carrie_. But _Carrie_ was his fourth stab at the novel form—he'd needed three before that to become publishable, even after the foundation he'd built for himself with the focused writing of his short stories. So if the King himself is willing to put in his time before swinging for the novel, shouldn't we do the same?

It's really a win-win. Shorts can build up to your novels, or earn you publishing credits, and for many amazing writers they're more than a means of practice—they're nuanced pieces of art in and of themselves.

Before wrapping this up, I want to make something clear: you _should_ keep working on your novel while you practice with short form, and, for that matter, with any of the drills. I'm just asking you to make practice a priority. Short form, in particular, will expand your writer toolbox and make your novels all the better. Remember that Stephen guy.

My experience with the drill

My background with short form

When I was 11, I outlined a novel. When I was 13, I wrote the novel ... mostly. When I was 17, I planned and wrote another novel. And for the next four years, I kept writing novels. Not once did I consider I could benefit from writing something shorter. Novels, after all, are the glitz and glam of the industry—rarely does a short story go "mainstream". Then I saw the answers in the Writers' Survey, and as I read craft books to confirm these findings, I realized that many writers—writers we all think as novelists—rose up in the industry on the merit of their short stories. So I took a hiatus from novel writing, and I began my journey down a shorter but no less difficult road.

I chose among the forms

When I refer to short form, I don't mean only short stories, though that's what comes to mind first. Next to short stories (which can be originals or fan fics), there are also the products of writing prompts and freewriting. Many writers find both of these latter two fulfilling, and there are benefits to both not found in the creation of a novel. For me, however, I wanted to use my novel hiatus as a way to build some publishing credits, and none of the short forms do this better than traditional short stories. So, shorts it was.

I started with a goal in mind

Beginning with the misconception that writing short stories is easier than writing novels, I penned a few pieces and sent them into contests, fully expecting to rack up some awards. I had been writing novels before this, and writing novels is so much harder than writing shorts.

When I learned how wrong I was, my concentration shifted. I no longer wanted to win awards; I simply wanted to write a good story. My writing in short form, therefore, became a sort of lab for me, somewhere I could leave my comfort zone, experiment, and get better. I realized that shorts could be extremely effective for this sort of learning, as their micronized focus and quicker turnaround time would allow for more reps. From that point on, my goal in writing shorts was to concentrate on the skillsets I could transfer to novel writing.

I worked toward that goal

This wasn't a goal I tucked away in the back of my mind—I kept it at the forefront. I allowed myself to take risks, to fail, and to learn from those failures. That iterative process is the best way to learn, and the best way to ensure the continual evolution of your MRs (this process, you'll notice, requires you to leave your comfort zone time and time again).

Here's an example. I had written almost exclusively from the perspective of characters around my own age. This was safe, and it was comfortable, and I knew that in a novel I wished to make as good as possible and sell to a publisher, I would be hesitant to branch out. But in the context of short stories, I wasn't afraid to try something new, so I wrote from the perspective of a ten-year-old. In fact, I was rather excited to do it. After removing the expectation of success, I freed myself to experiment, and paradoxically, I found more success with that story than any of my other work up to that point.

I reviewed my work with my goal in mind

Before that success, however, before, even, I let the story out the door, I took it through extensive revisions. And not just your typical draft to draft editing. I assessed what I had learned from the piece, what I had done well, what I had failed at, what I could work on in the drafts and stories to come (remember what I said about how the try-fail cycle evolves your MRs).

More important than my own review of the story was the review of others. The shortness of it made it an easy ask when approaching people for feedback. This might be my favorite benefit of writing short form. The write, get feedback, and revise cycle is dramatically faster than that for novels, and allows for rapid, incremental improvement.

The first version of my ten-year-old was stilted and one-dimensional. But who cares? It was never my goal to publish the thing, anyway. That was my internal dialogue, and at the same time as keeping me moving toward my learning objectives, it kept the writing process as stress free as possible.

Reflections

I use short stories as training grounds for my novels. Which is no shade to short story writers. As I've said, your form is incredibly, frustratingly difficult. That difficulty, though, and the shrunken scale of the undertaking, allows for more intense bursts of concentration, lower risk opportunities to leave your comfort zone, and more iterations of feedback, which allows for more evolution of your MRs. (If you've lost track of that abbreviation, remember, we're referring to "mental representations", the mental models/thought processes you have for understanding something—as our understanding of how to write a good story evolves, so too evolves our _mental representation_ of a good story).

The bestseller interview – Gregory Norman Bossert

Greg Bossert is an American writer (and filmmaker) of Science-Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. His short stories have appeared in major genre publications such as _Asimov's_ and _Beneath Ceaseless Skies_. In 2013 he won the World Fantasy Award.

I met Greg at the 2019 Worldcon in Dublin, Ireland, and he was kind enough to respond to a few questions. Thanks, Greg!

What has been the general arc from how you started writing to how you got to your current skill level?

As you recall, I starting writing by spending a year (2008 to early 2009) working up two feature length screenplays, literally on a dare from artist and designer Iain McCaig. (More on that below).

I greatly enjoyed the process of working on the screenplays, and the drafts provided me with a useful conversation starter when corresponding with acquaintances from the film design/art department world. But it felt like a bit of a dead-end activity, as at that point I saw no way to do anything with the final drafts.

Fortunately, I had a friend from the film world who, after reading one of my screenplays, somewhat bashfully admitted that she had written a draft of a novel. She was as baffled about what to do next with that novel as I was with my screenplays. So we decided to each come up with a short story — partially because that seemed a simpler task and partially because the process of selling a short story seemed less intimidating than that of marketing a novel or screenplay.

Lesson #1: having a writing buddy, a partner in crime—someone actually writing, and at a similar spot in their career—is a great help! This is a different thing than finding a good first reader or mentor; it's much more about having someone dealing with the same sort of self-doubt and confusion and learning process. Fortunately, with social media and online media, it seems easier and easier to find such a partner.

I wrote four stories from mid-2009 to early 2010. The first one was a novelette that remains unsold; it was good practice on the basic skills of structuring and editing short fiction, but many of the ideas and literary techniques were pretty heavy-handedly derivative of my favorite writers.

I was enormously fortunate with the second story, "The Union of Soil and Sky", as it sold to Asimov's SF. Asimov's editor Shiela Williams found it in the 'slush pile' and sent me a very kind letter saying that she liked it, but had a number of questions. That's her editing style; she rarely gives suggestions, but instead asks questions that inspire the author to come up with a better story. After a few weeks of rewrites she bought the story, and then went on to buy the next two that I wrote, again guiding them to their final drafts via many useful comments.

So Lesson #2: mentors are also useful. Take every chance to work with, or even just listen to, an experienced editor or author. That doesn't mean you need to do take every suggestion or bit of advice they offer. But pay attention to the things they think are important, even if you come up with your own way of addressing those things.

Finally, in 2010 my writing buddy and I goaded each other into applying for the Clarion 2010 workshop, and we both got in. The instructors that year were Delia Sherman & Ellen Kushner, George RR Martin, Dale Bailey, Samuel R Delany, and Ann & Jeff VanderMeer. And my fellow students included Kai Ashante Wilson, John Chu, Tamsyn Muir, Karin Tidbeck, and many other excellent writers and dear friends.

Lesson #3: there's a wonderfully welcoming and generous community of writers and editors out there. You don't need to attend a workshop to find them, but you do need to put yourself out there and *show* *your* *stories*. You're not really writing until you are showing your work to people you don't know. The process will be painful — stories you love will be misunderstood or simply rejected, and others will sell but will be seemingly ignored, and editors will require changes and cuts that will hurt like hell.

It took me four or five months to recover from Clarion, but by the end of 2010 I think I was finally writing at a professional level. I started branching out from science fiction into fantasy, horror, and weird cross-genre works. I started sending stories to new markets, including ones that would have seemed absurd the year before, e.g. I sold a story to the Saturday Evening Post. And I got over the fear of rejections, bad reviews, and stories getting published and ignored.

Before writing short stories, you wrote screenplays. What did you learn from that longer form that helped with your short fiction?

Screenplays are all about structure and dialogue, and about stripping away anything that doesn't tell the story. A lot of discussion of fiction focuses on character, plot, world building, description: all of which is important, of course, and essential in writing at novel length. But I think short fiction benefits from the same bare bones as screenwriting—structure, story, and dialogue—which keep it concentrated and intense.

In the course of your writing, has there ever been a moment of realization when you learned something specific about your habits or tendencies? How did that realization come to you, and how did you adapt as a result?

I am still struggling with some writing habits, most of all the preference for writing during the afternoon at a cafe. That's still my most effective time/place for writing, but with the day job I can only do so once or twice a week. I'm slowly getting better at writing anywhere at any time. One thing that helps is to have a bunch of stories going at once in various styles, genres, and states of completion. If I am stuck on one thing, I can switch to another, and if nothing is working, I can at least read through what I've already got.

Branching out from science fiction to other genres, and more profoundly, away from the concept of genre at all, was a big step for me. Before that, I was far too prone to rely on received ideas and language. In particular, moving into horror and "Weird" cross-genre stuff was incredibly liberating, as I am far less well read in those fields and thus more easily freed of preconceptions.

One somewhat unusual habit of mine, that I do not necessarily recommend, is that I tend to revise constantly as I go. Often I will start a writing session by rereading and revising everything I've already written on a story. The benefit is a fluid process that lets me redirect a story as I go. The drawback is that sometimes I bog down in what I've already written before fully understanding where the story will go. And also that my ending sections are far more likely to have a bunch of typos!

Why did you start writing short stories instead of novels? In what ways has/hasn't that decision paid off for you?

As I said above, it was literally a matter of convenience: I knew how to send a story to a magazine, whereas the labyrinth of agents, publishers, cover letters and manuscripts, etc. seemed impenetrable at the time.

The benefits have been, I think, significant. I am well past any fear of rejection, and have learned to work with editors, usefully adopt advice from first readers, keep writing despite feeling stalled, etc.

The biggest drawback is that it is hard to feel a "real" writer, at least for me, without having a proper book out on paper. And selling a short story collection without having a novel or two out is a tricky thing. (Though getting easier, I think, via small presses.)

I do want to eventually get some novels organized, and have plans for one that is a mosaic/assemblage of related stories—a way to sneak up on the format!

But I am also getting back into film writing, since my current day job in the film industry provides a (small!!) chance of someone actually reading a screenplay!

Have you ever consciously chosen a focus for a story? Something you want to work on, such as dialogue, setting activation, character development, etc.? Or does that focus arise organically according to the needs of the story?

Yes! For example, my story "The Hearts of All" which just came out in the January issue #73 of Black Static magazine was based on a deliberate desire to write something about the wildfire in California and Australia.

And my story "Left Hand Jane" came from the (in hindsight absurd and very challenging!) idea of writing a first person story from the POV of something with no clear self-identity (an autonomous severed hand that had lost its body) and thus not use the first person pronouns I/me/mine/etc.

For almost all of my stories, however, the genesis is not in one single idea, but the tension between two or more ideas. E.g. for my fantasy "The Leaves Upon Her Falling Light" it was the medieval tradition of "unmaking" a deer at the end of a successful hunt along with the "Glass Delusion" of Charles VI of France. In my SF story "Bloom" it was the science of island ecologies meeting the true story of some soldiers stepping on a landmine that did not explode. Etc.

Conclusion

That's it for this drill. You now have everything you need to turn your short form sessions into improvement sessions. If you're looking for some step-by-step instructions on how to get started, I encourage you to download the "WRITE (short form)" Training Sheet. It's a PDF guide that will walk you through the drill with specific action steps, and it's totally free. You can snag it at engelwrite.com/trainingsheets.

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# Drill 1.3 – Write

# (long form)

find mastery in the pages of your books

Well. You're writing a novel. It's exciting, but it's also time-consuming and stressful. So how do you make sure your time and stress result in a unique novel that rings true to your voice? Or that the project as a whole contributes to the skills you've already built?

To make the most of your novel writing time, we will apply the normal principles of deliberate practice.

The first step, per usual, is to concentrate on what you're writing. This is when you should be searching for natural inclinations. Keeping at the forefront of your mind what you've learned about the various components of story—dialogue, description, plot, whatever—you can recognize the components you're inclined toward the most, or the ones you have a nontraditional approach to. These things could form the foundation of your writer identity.

As you find the components of writing you're inclined toward, you should work to evolve the mental representations you have for them, and experiment with how you approach them, searching for the method that makes the most sense to _you_.

This is where having the long runway of a novel comes in handy. With continuity in the story, you can leave your comfort zone to explore this new approach or stylistic touch as you move from chapter to chapter.

And finally you need to get feedback, both from an external source, which we've already discussed, and from yourself. Evaluate the risks you're taking and judge whether or not they feel right, if they feel aligned with the beginnings of your identity.

Then again, I know I've oversimplified this process. Finding a unique style isn't as simple as finding one thing you're good at and adding a little flare to it. I recognize that, but I still think pinpointing one or two of those things will set you down the right path of exploration.

Also, I know the conventional advice is to _fly_ through the first drafts of your novels and not worry about details until the editing process. So you might be worried that focusing on all this stuff as you go will distract you from the creative rush.

It's a reasonable concern. I'm a huge fan of the rapid first draft so I'm protective of that strategy as well, but we can have the best of both worlds. Consider an example. Does remembering your intention to make more stylized use of sentence fragments hinder your creative process? It might make you pause and think every now and then while you're writing, but that only means you're pushing yourself to make improvements, improvements you can't make by inserting the change retroactively via revision. The only way to internalize the approach you're working with is to start a new novel with the clear intention to use that approach. So for the _next_ novel you write, using those sentence fragments will have become second nature.

At least try it for a few chapters. Be more present while you work on your novel, and use that work to find a unique voice.

(I want to stress once again that writing your novel is not necessarily a sequential part of the 7 Drills—you can and should be producing pages during your practice.)

My experience with the drill

My background with writing long form

As I mention above, I was a novel guy from day one. Writing novels was my natural bent, so no one had to convince me of its benefits. I did have to be convinced, however, that I was doing it all wrong. Here's how I started out. I would get an idea. I would think up some characters. And I would start writing. For a pantser, someone who does little to no outlining ahead of time, this would be just fine. But pantsers spend just as much time inhabiting their world, inhabiting their characters, as the most rigorous outliners, only _during_ the writing process, not in advance of it. I, on the other hand, _never_ inhabited my worlds, not properly, anyhow.

I explored my story

My most recent novel began as a short film in 2016. I shelved it. I toyed with the idea for years, thinking about the concept, the characters, the setting, letting it all simmer on the backburner of my mind, and I didn't pick it up again until late 2019. By then I had spent a lot of time in the world of the novel, so when I started writing, I felt less like a creator and more like a scribe, writing things down as I saw them playing out in my head.

This might sound as if I'm advocating for the outlining method, but I'm agnostic about _when_ a writer spends time in her world, whether that's before the writing or during the writing, as long as she does. For pantsers, instead of daydreaming before the first word, maybe you write winding backstories for your characters, off-screen histories and dialogues that never make it into the book. Or maybe you rewrite the book two or three or four times until you find the voice of your protagonist. Whatever the method, exploring your story is the first and most vital step of making the most of your long form writing. It's the language of your story, and you can't practice its contents until you're fluent in it.

I identified an element to concentrate on

In this novel, I really wanted to bring the setting to life. I wanted the town to be as much a character in the story as Derry is in IT. I had never created a place like that in my writing, so this would force me out of my comfort zone. Perhaps I could have pursued a true "whoosh" method with my first draft, writing the story with reckless abandon and filling in the gaps afterward, but I've found this method to be more efficient in building my skill as a writer. I choose only one element per book—setting characterization, character development, dialogue, etc.—and I concentrate on it. The rest of the story I trust to my intuition, and whoosh it went.

I focused on that element

There were times when I forgot what I was trying to practice, and then I would read the name of the town, or it would be raining in the story, and I would remember, and I would concentrate on bringing the place to life. But I wasn't satisfied by these temporary lapses in focus. So in the header of my document, I wrote myself a reminder "Make it breathe". Every time I reached a new page, I saw the header, and I remembered what my focus was for the novel. I established continuity with my concentration, and because of that, I built confidence more quickly.

I judged my progress (and got feedback)

It was important for me to get feedback on an early draft, so I could determine if I was moving in the right direction with my setting characterization. The constructive criticism I received was vital in shaping my renewed approach.

My first round of revisions was where the feedback started to pay dividends. Now separated from the work, I could objectively judge the results of my miniature experiments—describing wind as the town's breath, the street lights as its nervous system, etc. I noted what worked for the future, and, most importantly, I reinforced the skill by writing a short story that centered in a similarly "alive" place, enabling me to get one last rep with my revised skill.

Reflections

I was determined to make the writing of this novel a masterclass for myself. I concentrated on a specific component to improve, I left my comfort zone and experimented with that component, I got feedback on how those experiments failed or succeeded, and I evolved my corresponding MR as a result. Because of all that, I can confidently say my time spent writing this novel was my most productive writing time to date.

The bestseller interview – Gregg Olsen

A #1 New York Times, Amazon Charts, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and USA Today bestselling author, Gregg Olsen has written ten nonfiction books, nineteen novels, a novella, and contributed a short story to a collection edited by Lee Child. His newest book, _If You Tell_ , is true-crime story of three sisters determined to survive their mother's house of horrors. You can check it out here: https://www.greggolsen.com/.

I read in one of your interviews that you mostly write in weekend sprints, for 10 hours a day, and work toward a word count. What are the benefits of that approach compared to a daily, less intense routine?

I work a full time job in addition to writing novels and nonfiction. That's one the main reasons. Even if I didn't, the sprint path makes the most sense for me. I like getting going until I'm done (can't do it anymore).

Do you ever intentionally "practice" your writing? Or do you get better through the process of writing?

Only through the process.

Are you a plotter or pantser? What positive effect does your chosen style have on your stories?

I start with an idea about what the story would be and then I just allow things to happen. Sometimes it has gotten me into a little trouble, but most of the times it seems to make the books better. An outline feels like a trap to me.

When you wrote your first novel/manuscript, how did you go about the process? How have you improved your process?

Same. I use notecards to jot down ideas that come to mind as I write and then place them on the kitchen counter as I figure out what idea should go next. I pull apart the ms. midway in the process of writing the book and do the same shuffle. The physical act of doing so, really helps me understand the story better as a total thing, not just chapter by chapter.

In the course of your writing, has there ever been a moment of realization when you spotted a bad habit, or otherwise learned something about your writing? How did that realization come to you, and how did you adapt as a result?

I was recently told that I fat shamed some characters so I'm being as careful as I can about that. I listen to my readers. They are important to me and I wouldn't be anywhere without them. I'm always trying to do a better job.

Conclusion

Done in conjunction with other practicing, writing a novel can be incredibly helpful in honing your craft. If you'd like some tips on how to make the most of your novel-writing time, I encourage you to download the "WRITE (long form)" Training Sheet. It's a PDF guide that will walk you through the drill with specific action steps, and it's totally free. You can snag it at engelwrite.com/trainingsheets.

Another Conclusion 

Let's review our main principles of deliberate practice.

Concentrate

Evolve your MRs (mental representations)

Leave your comfort zone

Get Feedback

Throughout the following chapters, we'll continue to underline these principles as they arise. So keep them top of mind, and know that we'll focus on different principles depending on the drill.

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# Drill 2 – Read

become great by spying on the greats

Do you ever zone out while you're reading? You just mail it in for a page or two, or you skip the exposition and head straight for the dialogue? If you do, then you're reading like a reader. You're losing out on the nuance. And you're missing the writer's glue that holds the story together.

Hundreds of people in the Writers' Survey agree, as the second-most-cited method of getting better at writing is to read like a writer. Now, people talk about that a lot, how it changes every novel you read into a textbook on how to tell a great story, and how it'll transform how you think about your writing. That's all true, but I want to talk about the habit in more detail, and in terms of our deliberate practice principles.

First, you need to concentrate and be intentional. This one is simple. In those pages and paragraphs when your reader eyes glaze over, your writer eyes have to stay sharp. You have to pay attention to the downbeats of the story, the pockets of silence during the build, as well as the crescendo of the climax.

The second deliberate practice principle is evolving your mental representations. Within the macro MR we have of good writing, there are micro MRs: what makes a compelling and active setting, what makes for believable character development, what creates an engaging plot structure, and so on. When you're reading like a writer, you're looking for how the author executes in these areas. You're aware of their intentions with a piece of dialogue, or with a description that's filtered through the perspective of a character. And you deepen your understanding of those things, filling in the gaps of your MRs.

But, you might say, reading is my escape. Analyzing while I read will take the joy out of it ... I don't think so.

I talked with a friend in an MFA program recently, and she told me how, after analyzing short stories for class, she would start doing that analysis automatically _outside_ of class. She loved it. It was like a composer listening to great music, noticing the choices of the other composer, and appreciating and learning from the work.

So give it a shot. Pick up your favorite book and read it like a writer. And if you get a few chapters in and you want to gauge your eyes out, you can always go back to reader-mode for a while.

My experience with the drill

I know the above is a little abstract, so let's talk examples.

My background with reading

I'm a writer, but well before that, I was a reader. Growing up, I read mostly fantasy—the Redwall series, the Warriors series, and of course, Harry Potter—and I read in huge quantities. I was the kid in middle school with a book under his desk. Or the anti-social cousin at family reunions reading on the swing. But the thing about that kind of reading is that it's done for entertainment. That's great, and without the pure joy and entertainment of reading, none of us would be writers. To _grow_ as a writer, however, you need to start reading like one. No, that doesn't mean treating every book you read like a homework assignment. But it _is_ wise to pick up a book every now and then with the intention to learn from it. I did this for the first time in January of 2019 (you'll see the early part of 2019 as a recurring date for these experimentations ... it was a busy time in the Engel household ).

I chose a novel

This first step is an obvious one, but I knew it was worth thinking about. I would spend a ton of time with this book, so I wanted to choose something I loved—I knew it would be easier to concentrate if I was engaged by the material. Also, I wanted something shortish, so the project wouldn't be as imposing. With these things in mind, I chose to read _Ender's Game_ , by Orson Scott Card.

I chose a focus

I mentioned choosing something shortish to keep the project manageable. Well, I chose a focus for the same reason. Reading like a writer and really trying to learn from a book was an overwhelming prospect. So instead of trying to figure out every last element of Card's style, I chose to focus on just one element of it: his characterization of Ender. Understanding what makes a great character would evolve my MR of how to create great characters. (Let me pause real quick. If you haven't read _Ender's Game_ , absolutely do. It won the Hugo *and* the Nebula, and it's just plain great. Okay, carrying on.) Going in with this mindset took off some of the pressure. It was no longer some big huge thing. I could concentrate on just one thing—one character—that's all.

I took notes

I chose a book and I chose a focus—both pretty straightforward. When I actually began ... things got a little hazy. There may be some note-taking templates out there telling you how to read like a writer, but if there are, I haven't found them (if you have, by all means let me know: mason@engelwrite.com). So I created my own style. Here's a snapshot of my notebook.

I know, my handwriting isn't *100%* legible. But hopefully you get the gist. I started with a general note, then quickly fell into a chronological rhythm, dividing the book into sections of 5%, taking character-focused notes within each chapter, and doing a recap at the end of each section (I chose this method because, secondarily to evolving my MR of character development, I also wanted to enhance my MR of the structural beats of a good story, and I thought breaking things down chronologically would help with that). This sounds like a lot, but it really wasn't too bad, because I wasn't constantly shifting between reading and note-taking—I stopped only every five to ten pages. That's a key takeaway, I think. You want to make this process as painless and frictionless as possible, and compartmentalizing/batching your reading and note taking is a great way of doing that.

On the topic of note taking, I'm not proposing my hieroglyphic scrawl as the one-size-fits-all method. It might help you to take notes on the pages of the book itself, highlighting, circling, underlining, the whole nine. I don't like doing that because I like to keep my books looking like new (60-degree open angles only, please), but if it works for you, go for it.

I reviewed my notes

After I got through the final 5% section of the book, I knew my job wasn't done. I'd been concentrating, sure, and I felt like I had a decent handle on how Card manipulated Ender's character over time, but I really wanted to solidify the evolution of my MR. So I flipped back through my notes, re-reading everything, even down to the plot summary stuff, and put stars by the bullet points that expressed an Ender insight. Then, with one final paragraph to export my understanding, the notes became engraved in my long term memory.

Reflections

I'm super glad I tackled this. And really, "tackled" is too strong of a word. It turned out to be an enjoyable task, one I looked forward to. After all, I got to read one of my favorite books of all time. And you know what? The analysis didn't ruin the book for me; it actually made me appreciate the story all the more.

Conclusion

All right, that's it for this drill. Reading like a writer will lay the foundation for your craft, and unlock your potential as a writer. If you're curious about some more specific instructions for how to get started, feel free to download the "Read" Training Sheet. It's a PDF guide that will walk you through the drill with specific action steps, and it's completely free. You can access it at engelwrite.com/trainingsheets.

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# Drill 3 – Get Feedback

become a master through outside guidance

Imagine a world without books, without oral histories, without stories of any kind. Then imagine a girl. She finds a notebook and a pen and instructions telling her how to write words. She starts writing, filling the pages, spinning her own tales, and she finds another notebook, another pen, and she continues writing and keeping her notebooks private, and she goes for years until she's written for tens of thousands of hours. At the end of it all, has she mastered the craft of writing? No. Her thousands of hours might as well have been hundreds, and your hours could be equally inefficient. So what's lacking?

Besides the obvious access to books, the girl's missing the third most important recommendation in the Writers' Survey: feedback. She's missing the guidance of editors, contemporaries, and readers, guidance that could have fixed her bad habits, that could have smoothed her prose and deepened her plots and propelled her to the height of the greats.

So what _is_ the best way to get feedback? The writers in the survey brought up three main sources: editors, readers, and fellow writers. Let's explore these sources in the context of this drill's three principles of deliberate practice (this Drill, you'll notice, is a principle in itself).

The first step in choosing a source of feedback is to concentrate on and be intentional about whom you're choosing. Professional editing isn't a commodity, so you should thoroughly vet your freelance editor candidates, as well as your beta readers and fellow writers.

The second important piece of the feedback process is to use the criticism you receive to evolve your mental representations of the craft. Pay attention to what your critic is telling you. Study the notes he gives you, and absorb his knowledge into your toolbox.

Finally, it's important what you do _after_ you get feedback: you have to leave your comfort zone while making revisions. This ties into our later drill, "Edit", but it's worth mentioning here. Acknowledge you might not be right, and force yourself to try different strategies and techniques to improve your story, even if you don't 100% agree with them. Because most writers will tell you: no matter if the feedback comes from editors or beta readers or critique partners, the person _giving_ the feedback is oftentimes right.

Or maybe that last sentence makes you cringe. Doesn't following the feedback of someone else just make your writing like that person's? Doesn't it rob you of your uniqueness?

I don't think so. Good feedback actually _reveals_ your uniqueness. It's like adding a pinch of salt to an already good recipe: with the right amount, it brings out the true taste of the dish. That's exactly what happened when I revised my self-published novel, _2084_. My beta readers read an early draft and seemed lukewarm. But after I worked with an amazing editor and made his suggested revisions, my readers noticed the difference, not only in the story but in the voice: they could finally hear _me_ in the writing.

But it's not as though you're obligated to make the proposed changes you get as feedback, so there's no real risk. Find someone to critique you, evaluate the criticism honestly, and go from there. But please, at least solicit that feedback in the first place.

My experience with the drill

My background with the drill

This drill, like editing, entered my writing toolbox far too late. I gave the rough draft of my first novel to a few people, but the feedback was so disappointing that, for years, I never showed anyone my writing. I wrote my first 500,000 words in a vacuum, unguided, and I built bad habits because of it. Because no one had commented on my flat characters, I kept writing them flat. Because no one brought up the lack of diversity in my cast, I kept characterizing the same demographic. Because no one highlighted all the clutter in my description and action, I kept cluttering. I stagnated. It wasn't until I decided to self-publish a short story that I realized I should probably send it to some people first. Lo and behold, they had feedback, and much of it was spot on. I've been learning from beta readers, critique partners, and professional editors ever since.

I decided on a type of feedback

My most recent success story with getting feedback is in the world of short stories. I've never written a lot of short form—my focus has always been on novels—but for some reason, there's a short story contest I really want to win: Writers of the Future. So I've been writing shorts, submitting, and getting rejected. Eventually I realized I wasn't giving my shorts the same love as my novels—I wasn't getting any outside feedback. With my next story, I decided to change that. First I thought of hiring a freelance editor, but that seemed like overkill. Then I thought of sending it to my usual beta readers, but I wasn't sure they would be as familiar with short form as would be helpful. Finally, I settled on finding critique partners. But not just any partners. I trolled the winner lists of the contest, and I reached out to past winners until someone got back to me. Two did (check out Amy Henrie Gillet and NRM Roshak—they're brilliant). This type of feedback was perfect, because it perfectly matched what I was trying to accomplish. Both authors had been where I wanted to go, and they could share insights about how to get there. Put another way, their MRs of a good short story allowed them to place in the contest, so if I could use their feedback to inform my own MR of a good short story, I would have a better chance of getting the result they did.

I was specific about what I wanted

Actually, with the first story I sent, I wasn't specific at all. I was just happy these talented writers got back to me. But after going through the feedback process a few more times, I started to be more detailed about what I was requesting. Here's an example email I sent to my neuroscientist cousin, whom I volunteered as my beta reader.

Here's the thing about asking for specific feedback: you're going to get it. And specific, in this sense, often means blunt. But blunt is great if you have thick enough skin to handle it, and the key to thickening your skin is to leave your comfort zone one piece of feedback at a time. Practice hearing candid assessments of your writing, and in time, you'll be able to hear even the most tactless criticism without a flinch.

I studied the feedback I received

There are two ways you can go about getting feedback. The first, and self-indulgent way, is to ask with the expectation of being showered with praise, and with a stubborn refusal to listen to criticism. The second, more productive way, is to leave your comfort zone. Acknowledge your piece can improve, and really make use of the feedback you get. I chose the second way, so I first tried to *understand* the feedback I received. I needed to concentrate, but how? I followed up with questions, had a quick call with my cousin, and then laid out all of the feedback—from all sources—in a single document, so I could see where opinions intersected. Finally, I categorized, shaping raw thoughts into an actionable revision plan. Making this as concrete as I could helped not only in leveraging the feedback, but also in depersonalizing it, allowing my feedback relationships to become more honest and straightforward.

Reflections

Had I failed to get feedback on the stories I submitted to the Writers of the Future Contest, or had I failed to act on the feedback effectively, I would not have gotten an honorable mention in the contest. The stories simply wouldn't have been as good as they are.

The value of feedback should be obvious in a practical sense, but if that's not enough, it's valuable in the context of deliberate practice as well. Our unrevised story represents v1 of our MR of a good story. The criticism we receive represents the difference between _our_ MR and the MR of our reader (who is almost always better at objectively evaluating our work). The reconciliation of these two MRs not only makes the story better. It also improves our conception of a good story. But that's pretty abstract. It's enough to say this: getting feedback forces you to concentrate on your weaknesses, leave your comfort zone, evolve your MRs, and become a better writer.

The bestseller interview: Romina Garber  
(aka Romina Russel)

Romina Garber (Russell) is a New York Times and international bestselling author whose books include the Zodiac series, a "breathtaking sci-fi space saga inspired by astrology", and the upcoming Wolves of No World series, a fantasy tale of immigration, "Argentine folklore, and what it means to be illegal".

Before being published, what was your favorite source of feedback? Why?

The best thing I did for myself and my writing career was start a critique group with a handful of aspiring authors. Even though we wrote in different genres, what united us was being at the same stage of the creative process, so we embarked on the publishing journey together. Some of us from that group are now published, and we promote each other's books and support each other through our ups and downs.

What was the setup of your critique group (the rules, schedule, etc.)?

For four years, my critique group met every other Sunday, and the rule was that anyone submitting a chapter had to email it to the group by Thursday. We tried to cap off each submission at ten pages, but we weren't strict about it. At our gatherings, we traded feedback, brainstormed ideas, and provided emotional support.

How can a writer get the most out of her critique group?

Two key takeaways from my critique group experience are:

1. Populate your critique group with people who are _constructive_ , not _critical_. Those two words are worlds apart. Your critique group should be a safe space, so you want partners who will be honest and forthcoming, but who will deliver their feedback considerately and with a view to building you up, not tearing you down.

2. Not all edits are created equal. It took me a while to learn how to discern which notes are worth heeding and which to let slide. As a perfectionist, my first impulse was to try to address everyone's every concern, which led to so many changes in my story that I lost the thread of my narrative. Writing is subjective, and it's important to differentiate between personal taste and faulty mechanics. One way to do that is to prioritize comments that are brought up by multiple readers, since they're most likely to point to real problems in the manuscript.

In the course of your self editing, has there ever been a moment of realization when you spotted a bad habit, or otherwise learned something about your writing? How did that realization come to you, and how did you adapt your writing as a result?

You'll find that much like a boy band, each critique partner has their own signature style. After enough time together, you will begin to hear their voices in your head as you write, calling out your bad habits. For example, one of my critique partners was known for pointing out everyone's _it_ -itis—when the word _it_ shows up a dozen times on one page—while another was a master at finding the strongest chapter outs. I'm now very aware of ending my chapters on a good hook.

How do you incorporate feedback from other sources (your editor, your beta readers)? Does one group see your writing in earlier stages than do the others?

Contract deadlines don't allow for enough freedom of time to continue the critique group format, but my partners and I continue to consult each other more informally. I usually send my first drafts to one of my critique partners and my agent, then I input their feedback before turning it in to my editor. I'll share the following draft with a few more beta readers, then I'll incorporate their notes along with my editor's in the next round. I try to trust my gut when it comes to feedback, and if there are things I feel strongly about, I fight for them. It all comes down to being true to the story.

Conclusion

Getting feedback on your writing is one of the fastest ways to level up your craft. But if you're looking for more concrete, step-by-step instructions on how to get started, I encourage you to download the "GET FEEDBACK" Training Sheet. It's a PDF guide that will walk you through the drill with specific action steps, and it's totally free. You can snag it at engelwrite.com/trainingsheets.

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# Drill 4 – Study

become a student; become an expert

Reading doesn't fully pull back the curtain on the mystery of great storytelling. So unless you pull back that curtain by another method, you'll remain in the audience, amazed, but unable to amaze an audience of your own.

Luckily the Writers' Survey had an answer for us, a way to become a scholar of the craft, to solidify your fundamentals of storytelling, and sharpen your technique until you're on stage with the masters.

"Study" was one of the most common answers in the survey. But how _do_ you study? There are several mediums you can investigate—craft books, writing classes, podcasts—but you should always keep in mind this drill's two main principles of deliberate practice: to concentrate and be intentional, and to evolve your mental representations.

Studying takes care of both these principles, but only the _right_ kind of studying. This isn't your late-night cramming for a test, or your disinterested skim of the notes before a quiz. Your entire focus should be on the study material, and you should have the clear intent to get better. So while you can definitely _enjoy_ a writing podcast or craft video, your goal should be to concentrate on the content.

But concentrating isn't enough. Studying provides the perfect environment to evolve your mental representations of the craft, and the great thing is you can tailor your studying to your needs at the time. For writers just starting out, macro-level resources might be the most helpful in building a broad, foundational MR of good writing. But for writers further along on the journey, the better option might be to explore micro-level resources: study material about setting, plot structure, character development, and so on.

And yet, a lot of writers I've talked to are skeptical of this academic-type approach, and they avoid this part of the training because they're afraid that learning the paradigms of the craft will make them unoriginal.

I understand that, but no one has mastered _any_ craft without first understanding its fundamentals. Before Picasso defined a new style of painting, he was first highly technical and proficient in traditional Renaissance methods. Before Jimmi Hendrix was creating sounds with the guitar no one had ever heard before, he was playing scales, getting a feel for the frets. And before there was a Michael Jordan, there was a Mike Jordan, some kid in a Carolina gym, doing ball drills.

So why not follow in the footsteps of the greats? If you study from the ground up and decide there's some convention or technique you don't like, you can ditch it, and when you do, you'll still have other tools that will help you cleave a unique path.

My experience with the drill

My background with studying

Up until going through the results of the Writers' Survey in 2019, I hadn't thought about "studying" how to write fiction. I had read a craft book or two, but beyond that I was unsure how studying applied to the world of writing. I decided to move in baby steps.

I committed to a resource

This is no small step, because usually, unless your name starts with "H" and ends with "ermione Granger", studying just isn't an enjoyable pastime. So it's important to choose a resource that you won't fall asleep while engaging with (remember: we're here to concentrate). For a while, I toyed around with the idea of applying to MFA programs, even stopping by the NYU office to ask questions to admissions. I love the world of academia, from the old buildings to the overall valuing of knowledge, so an MFA was an intriguing idea. But as much as I love soaking in the university atmosphere, I love not spending money more. I settled on YouTube.

The most highly-recommended video series from the Writers' Survey comes from the bestselling, award-winning fantasy author, Brandon Sanderson. Returning to his alma mater, BYU, and teaching a course called "Writing Science-Fiction and Fantasy", Sanderson filmed all of the lectures and uploaded them to YouTube. They're free. That's great news for SFF writers, but also great news for everyone else. Upwards of 99% of the material is transferable among genres: principles, best practices, and so forth (he does take an extensive look at magic systems, but if you're not into that, you can always skip by).

I *studied*

Sanderson delivered his lectures in a classroom, so I thought I should receive them in one. But I didn't go applying to BYU. Instead I created a classroom setting in my living rom. All I needed was my laptop and a pen and paper, and a concentrated stream of focus. I didn't watch the videos while re-watching Friends or Supernatural. I was in school, and I acted like it. I paid attention. I took notes. And afterward, I studied.

I applied what I learned

I studied not as an academic, but as a writer. I thought about the concepts in the context of _my_ writing, the conflict enhancement strategies in the context of _my_ plots. But as helpful as this was for my broader MRs, it was very high level. It wasn't until I applied what I learned that the pieces came together.

One of the models Sanderson proposes for dealing with and diagramming the progression of subplots stuck with me. I was writing a rather complex conspiracy novel at the time, and was very much in need of a way to simplify. So, armed with my notes from the lectures, I opened the doc and got to work. A little ways into the revision, I realized I didn't fully understand the method (I find this sort of *almost* understanding is hard to detect without first trying to apply the knowledge in question). So I went back and re-watched the lecture. Now, after understanding the method fully, practicing with it throughout my convoluted novel, it's a fleshed-out addition to my MR of story structure.

I iterated

Adding the subplot bracketing method was a big win, but as often seems to happen after gaining knowledge or skill, I realized a related area of deficiency: all of my subplots were directly connected to my main character. In some novels this is perfectly fine, but in my kind of twisted sci-fi, or especially in high fantasy with a large cast, that can't be the case. Secondary characters should have relationships with other secondary characters. They should have dreams and schemes. Mine existed only in contrast to my main character, only to propel or impede his progress through a certain subplot. Without implementing the bracketing technique, I may not have realized this, and I may not have started working on it as soon as I did. (To put it another way: clarifying an element of your MR will oftentimes reveal a murkier element, one which you can clarify through study.) How am I working on it? Once again by studying, this time studying novels. How is it done in high fantasy? How can I make it work in my own stories?

Study recommendations

If you're looking for study material, I've got you covered. It would be messy to list everything here, so I made a blog post categorizing all the recommendations in the Writers' Survey, from podcasts, videos, articles and more. You can find the full list at

engelwrite.com/blog/studyrecommendations.

For now, I'll leave you with my three favorite craft books

_On Writing_ , by Stephen King

_Bird by Bird_ , by Anne Lamott

_The Seven Basic Plots_ , by Christopher Booker

Reflections

Studying was a game changer for me. Not only did it teach me a ton. It also changed the way I think about writing, cementing the idea that the craft is something that can be incrementally honed and improved. While I had believed this claim at a high level, it wasn't until I brought true intention to my own improvement (it's hard _not_ to be intentional about improvement if you commit to studying) that I realized how attainable it actually is. It made the prospect of learning seem more manageable, as any good teacher—or teaching material—aims to do.

The bestseller interview – Jodi Picoult

Jodi Picoult is the #1 bestselling author of twenty-five novels including _My Sister's Keeper_ , _Nineteen Minutes_ , _A Spark of Light_ , and _Small Great Things_. Over 14 million copies of her books are in print worldwide, translated into 34 languages.

You can pre-order her upcoming novel, _The Book of Two Ways_ , about "the choices that change the course of our lives", here: bit.ly/jpicoult-book-link.

What is your favorite way to study the craft? Reading craft books? Talking with other authors? Attending workshops? What about this medium do you like?

I can't say I "study" it as much as practice it these days. As a beginning writer, I recommend taking a workshop until you can learn to edit yourself — to give and get criticism and to write on demand. It gives you the tools you use most as a writer, and you get to develop them in a safe space. Now, I tend to talk to other authors to brainstorm if necessary to work out a problem in a manuscript.

If an aspiring author had to choose only one piece of study material (one craft book, writing podcast, workshop, etc.), what would you recommend to them?

Workshop, 100%. A book tells you how one person solved the issue of learning to write, but it is different for everyone, which is why a workshop helps you learn what works for YOU.

When you've taken a course on writing, which course format have you found more helpful: a broad-sweeping curriculum about writing as a whole, or a targeted curriculum about its particular components (about character, description, etc.)?

The most valuable curricula, to me, are ones that are not studying literary texts alone but that make the bulk of the material covered stories/pieces written by the participants, and workshopped.

When you engage in a certain study method (a workshop, say), how do you make the most of the experience? How do you learn as much as possible?

For a workshop it's about being aware that people sometimes approach a text with fresh eyes, when you are too close to it. It's giving credence to each comment and note and asking yourself honestly if you can use that to improve what you originally wrote. And it's not being so precious that you think nothing you write might be worth scrapping.

Conclusion

Studying the craft is vital in creating your MR of great writing, which will dramatically accelerate your ability to produce great writing yourself. But maybe you'd like a more concrete framework to make the most of your studying. If so, you can download the "STUDY" Training Sheet. It's a PDF guide that will walk you through the drill with specific action steps, and it's totally free. You can snag it at engelwrite.com/trainingsheets.

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# Drill 5 – Edit

critique your work the right way

If all you do is write stories and shove them in a drawer and move on to something new, you won't have time to realize what you might be doing wrong, and you'll build bad habits. Editing is the way to avoid this.

Time and time again in the Writers' Survey, writers talked about how quickly it helps you improve, how easily it exposes _bad_ habits and smooths out your sentences. But they also divided editing into two categories: editing one's own work, and editing someone else's in a critique setting.

Each activity offers ways to apply our deliberate practice principles. While editing our own work, try to leave your comfort zone. Pay attention to each paragraph and sentence and word, and push yourself to identify inconsistencies and clunky dialogue and overall plot problems. Be harsh. Think of it as if you're giving yourself feedback. How can you give the most straightforward, honest feedback as possible? And how can you make the most of that feedback once you have it? (See Drill #3 for the answers ). And what does feedback do? It evolves your mental representations of the craft, sharpening your idea of what's effective, of what works in dialogue, of what makes a good opening—everything.

But that's not all editing can do for us. If we edit someone _else's_ work, we're opening ourselves to a whole new dimension of improvement. Unlike reading our own stories, when we might be tempted to let errors or inconsistencies slide, reading someone else's work with a critical eye _forces_ you to see the mistakes. Almost unconsciously, your editing will become more concentrated and intentional, because you're not worrying about all the work it'll take to fix something. All you see is the mistake, and in seeing it so clearly you'll probably realize a similar problem in your own work, one you can fix later on.

Okay, so this is usually the part where I try to guess how you might disagree with or push back on the drill. For editing, I can't think of a single objection a committed writer might raise. It is absolutely, unequivocally necessary.

It's true for contemporary writers and all-time greats alike. Most recently, E Lockhart said she rewrote her award-winning _We Were Liars_ around 15 times (bit.ly/elockhartsource). And the classics from guys like Dickens (bit.ly/dickens-edit-source) and Orwell (bit.ly/orwell-edit-source) were similarly chopped and butchered.

Besides, if you edit with the above principles in mind, you'll either find a bunch of ways to improve your story, or you'll realize it's perfect and you're better than the best to ever do it. It's a win-win.

My experience with the drill

My background with editing

Mmm. How I wish I had started earlier. The fact is, for my first five novels, I never edited a line. I would shelf a manuscript right after I'd finished the rough draft. If it was lucky, it might get a quick pass for proofreading, but there was never anything developmental. That's how it was for the first 500,000 words of my writing career. I'm cringing just thinking about it. How much sooner, how much faster could I have gotten better, if I had just doubled back on some old work and tried to make it better? I'll never know. What I do know is that when I _did_ start editing my work, revising and iterating and improving, I started cranking out professional-level stuff. But even then, I edited to make a _story_ better. It wasn't until the writers' survey that I started editing to make my _writing_ better.

I formed my revision plan

The first manuscript of mine that I edited with this new mindset, was the first novel I'd ever written. It had undergone seven rounds of tinkering and proofreading, but there were still tons of big problems.

So I needed a revision plan, and the first step in creating that plan was to solicit feedback. I've never learned more, never grown more as a writer, than I have when working with a developmental editor on a novel. Feedback on the long form is incredibly valuable, and it shaped my revision plan from the ground up.

Next I combined notes from my editor with my own notes from earlier drafts. I then created a document organized by story act, broken down by sequence and scene, getting specific about what I wanted to change. This helped me concentrate on the macro problems, and allowed those problems to marinate as I dealt with easier-to-fix issues. Before the writers' survey, that's where I would have stopped. As it was, I knew I could learn something from these macro problems, something about my writing. I was right. Most of the stuff not working in the book had to do with one of two elements: character development or clarity of plot. These are two things I concentrated on intentionally: creating believable characters who change and evolve with the story, and weaving in clarity of the backstory and premise and general state of the world through deep POV exposition. And because I didn't have much experience doing these things well, all the related revisions pushed me well beyond my comfort zone.

I made the surface pass

After I knew the big problems, and after I'd correlated those problems to weaknesses in my writing, it was time to drop into the trenches. I started with the easy-to-fix stuff, deliberately ignoring the glaring problems. Refreshing yourself on the full, detailed context of the story will often bring solutions without much effort. Now that you're thinking about character development, or explanation of story through deep POV, you constantly spot ways to improve those things. By bringing these problems to the forefront of my mind, I could categorize the individual problems, concentrate on making the revisions, and file the improvements away in the corresponding MR. It's the perfect environment to isolate a component of writing and practice it.

I executed on the revision plan

Most of my revision plans for manuscripts can be executed with some cut and pasting, deleting, inserting, and rewriting. The revision plan for my first novel, on the other hand, looked more like an outline. Still, I stuck to it.

I made the polish pass

Taking the completion of the revision plan as given, it's time to think about polishing. Again, this was a phase of editing that I had always viewed as a way to make the story better, specifically, by improving the line-by-line prose. But by applying the same method by which we correlated macro plot problems to weaknesses in our writing, we can also correlate line-level problems with weaknesses in our prose. One way of doing this is to keep notes as you edit, identifying the overuse of a particular word (your word processor should have a search function to help with this), a particular sentence structure, or a particular flow of dialogue. Another way to identify these ticks is with an editing tool, like ProWritingAid.

ProWritingAid runs reports on your writing, for style, grammar, repetition, sticky sentences, and so on, and highlights recurring issues. (I use the Word plug-in, because there's no better word processer than Word 2010—I will not be persuaded otherwise.) It's super easy to see what you're consistently doing wrong. For me, with my manuscript, I did this weird thing where, when describing action, I would say something like "She began to turn around" or "It began to grow", instead of "She turned around" and "It grew". It seems like a small thing, but realizing that tick, and removing it from my writing, has made my MR of good prose more active. But this wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't broadened my conception of editing. Editing should make your story better, of course, but it should also make _you_ better.

Reflections

When we edit, when we read something we've written, we're looking at our MR in its rawest form. It's a great opportunity to learn. We can identify subconscious beliefs and assumptions, and we can eliminate or reinforce according to what makes the story better. They key to doing this is to accept your MR of a good story isn't perfect, and push yourself to make it better.

The bestseller interview – Anne Hillerman

Anne Hillerman is a New Mexico journalist and New York Times best-selling author, continuing the Navajo mystery novels of her father, novelist Tony Hillerman. You can find her latest: _The Tale Teller_ , here: bit.ly/hillerman-book.

What does your self editing process look like? (how long do you wait after a first draft to begin editing? how many passes do you make? etc.)

I do some editing in the process of writing. That consists of cleaning up what I've done the previous day before starting on something new. Often I'll make a note to myself.. research this .. awkward sentence .. cliché ... etc. Then I'll go back and fix the problem later, perhaps if I'm having an uninspired day for moving the story forward or as a warm up before my serious work. If I reach a place where I'm not sure how to advance the story, I go back to where it seemed to be moving smoothly and try to figure out where I took a wrong turn. I try to wait a week before re-reading the entire book. I do a second full re-read and revisions after I hear from my beta readers, another when my agent chimes in (unless she only wants a few minor changes) and then, again when I hear from the editors.

Have you ever used an editing software (Grammarly, ProWritingAid, or others)? Why or why not?

I have never used an editing software. I haven't even looked into them. My own process is complicated and slow but seems to work.

Is there a step or strategy in your editing process that you find to be particularly helpful? Or that you feel is not fully leveraged by other writers?

Two things help me most: 1. Getting honest reactions from people with different backgrounds whom I trust to give me feedback and 2. Giving the manuscript time to sit before I re-read and dissect it for editing.

What did your career as a journalist teach you about editing? What could other writers learn from the journalism world's style of editing?

Journalism taught me not to be overly sensitive to criticism. Journalism's focus on getting to the point, avoiding extraneous details and highlighting the crucial ones can be helpful to every author.

In the course of your self editing, has there ever been a moment of realization when you spotted a bad habit, or otherwise learned something about your writing? How did that realization come to you, and how did you adapt your writing as a result?

Yes. This realization differs with each book and comes either from my own re-reading or from the comments of another reader. In _Stargazer,_ the novel I'm almost done with I realized I had the wrong villain when I was about 60 percent done. Usually the insight is less dramatic, perhaps a matter of over-use of certain words or phrases. In any case, I'll do another revision and fix the problems.

Do you ever edit/critique the work of other authors? What do you learn from that process?

I was part of a critique group earlier in my career. I learned that other writers may have good insights into how to improve a piece of prose. Most helpful to me were their questions about character motivation, plot points and details of setting. If they were critiquing a work in progress, I benefitted from their speculation on how the story might develop, and their feedback on what they thought worked and where my story lost their interest. In term of providing my own critique, I found that simply saying, "I didn't understand this" or "These sections lost my interest" seemed to be better received than my ideas for how to fix things.

Conclusion

Revising your own work and critiquing the work of others combine for a masterclass in good writing. It can be grueling, though, and sometimes you might feel as though you're spinning your wheels. So if you'd like a more concrete framework to make the _most_ of your editing, you can download the "EDIT" Training Sheet. It's a PDF guide that will walk you through the drill with specific action steps, and it's totally free. You can snag it at engelwrite.com/trainingsheets.

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# Drill 6.1 – Enjoy Art

draw inspiration from the art around you

How do you grow your creativity? You start with a spark of it, but if you're ever to reach your full potential as a writer, you need a full-blown fire. The catch is, stoking the flames is a delicate process, and very quickly you can find your heat growing cold.

Writers in the survey had a strategy to avoid that: they consume art. No matter the form, the creativity intrinsic to art begets more creativity, and it inspires us to create art of our own—stories.

So how do you "consume" art? As usual we want to keep in mind some principles of deliberate practice. First, really concentrate and be present when you're around the art. If you're watching TV, you don't necessarily need a notepad in your lap, but you _should_ be taking note of the dramatic arc, the dialogue, the conflict, and character interaction. The same is true for other art forms. If we pay attention, music can tell a story as well any novel, as can a painting or a dance or anything else that takes us on an emotional journey.

The second principle, evolving your mental representations, is a big focus as well—how you notice the approach of the artist, how you peer into her mind through the lens of her work. But an even better way to evolve your MRs with the help of artists is to watch interviews. The interviewer does all the hard work for you, deconstructing the artist's process. All you have to do is listen to these different perspectives, and feel your understanding of art begin to deepen.

But this might seem counterintuitive. If you want to be a great writer, why should you bother with consuming non-literary art? Shouldn't all your time be spent reading and writing?

I don't think so, and neither did Leonardo Da Vinci. Though perhaps best known for his painting, Da Vinci's interests were amazingly eclectic, ranging from flying machines to botany to human anatomy. And in the end, this amazing melting pot of knowledge was a large contributor to the groundbreaking, life-like quality of his work.

Similarly, incorporating multiple disciplines of art into your life can be rewarding for your writing. And besides ... it's art we're talking about. It's not a chore; it's a treat.

My experience with the drill

My background with enjoying art

Not growing up around a museum or taking an interest in painting or poetry, I was by no means a "high" art kid. Southern Indiana isn't known as the hotbed for sophisticated art. But I'm not complaining. I'm saying that only to explain what follows. My enjoyment of "common" art directly corresponds to, and perhaps created, my tendency to write commonly accessible fiction—I'm not gunning for Pulitzers, only satisfied readers. Maybe this sounds like an over-explanation to you, but for me it was important to realize. I had this misconception that in order to learn from art, you had to choose the "best" art, the "highest" art. But what if that's not what you're trying to create? You can learn from that high art, sure, but wouldn't it make more sense to learn from art you aspire to imitate?

I chose a form

With all that in mind, when I decided to leverage my consumption of art for the improvement of my writing, I didn't limit myself. My only restriction was, for the sake of time, that the art be something I consume passively (while still concentrating). I chose TV. I could watch an episode per day, spread across my lunch break and other short breaks throughout my work, and I could deepen my understanding of long form storytelling.

I got specific

Around this time, I was preparing for a short story that centered on a child who feels no emotions and no pain, and as my MR of such a character was extremely lacking, I thought it would be helpful to watch a show about one. This thought process led me to, "Dexter", a story about a serial killer who kills bad guys.

Dexter is a sociopath, which is close to the character I was trying to write (though my guy was much gentler), so it was a perfect match. I watched the entire show over the course of a few months, all before writing a word of the short story (which ended up getting an honorable mention in a major contest).

I made it easy to consume

In my case, it wasn't really an issue—Netflix, for better or worse, has made their content insanely easy to consume. I just opened the app on my TV, played during a break, and resumed during my next break. But if you're hoping to use a different art form to learn from, you can find more specific ideas for staying consistent in the Training Sheet.

I processed and iterated

"Dexter" was easy for me to process, as I was deliberately studying it for my short story. I could apply my new familiarity with non-feeling characters in my own writing, driving home the evolution of my MR.

The next iteration of this exercise, the next shows I chose for myself, represented a swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction: character studies of non-sociopaths, lighter shows like "Supernatural" and "Stranger Things". Making this shift, and contrasting it with "Dexter", helped me cement the sociopath character trait in my writer's toolbox, and illuminated healthier character interactions as a result, dramatically improving how I wrote my own characters. Not once did I go to the opera or the Louvre. And my lowly art has served me just fine.

Reflections

There are a million ways we can learn from the creativity of others. It's a natural and fluid process, which makes it easy to do, but it also makes it easy to be undisciplined with. The key for me to actually learning from the art I was enjoying, the tiny act that turned my daily indulgence into a daily practice, was my concentrating on a specific piece of the art I wanted to learn from (the main character, Dexter). That allowed me to evolve my MR for that character archetype and apply it to my writing.

What could you concentrate on in the shows you watch, in the poetry you read, or the music you listen to, that would help your writing?

The bestseller interview – Anne Corlett

Anne Corlett has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and has won a number of awards for her fiction, including the H. E. Bates Award. You can find her latest novel, _The Space Between the Stars_ , here: bit.ly/corlett-link.

**What is your favorite sort of art to consume (poetry, painting, television, etc.)? How has that form influenced your writing?**

I'm not sure I could say I have a favourite form. I tend to like things that offer an unusual perspective or alternate take on something well-known. I usually have a couple of songs that fit with whatever I'm writing, and they're often covers, such as Lorde's dark interpretation of Everybody Wants to Rule the World, or some of the Radio 1 Live Lounge versions. The same goes for television – I'm currently enjoying the trend for quirky re-imaginings of classics such as Sherlock Holmes and Dracula.

What has been the general arc from how you started writing, to how you got to your current skill level? Have you ever thought about "practicing" your writing?

I wrote from a very young age, but fell out of the habit for a few years. When I came back to it, I launched into my first novel without any real idea of what I was doing. It caught the attention of my now-agent, but never made it into print. The second novel was a little more considered, and came close to being picked up, but it was the third, written on the Bath Spa Creative Writing MA course, that finally got there. I expected to find writing easier with each novel, but, in some ways, it seems to get harder. With the most recent novel, which I finished only a few weeks ago, I second-guessed almost every sentence, checking it for all the bad habits I now know that I have, and for all the things I know I should be doing. I'm hoping it's just a phase, and, at some point, I'll be able to go back to just ploughing through the first draft without worrying about whether it's any good.

Think of a time when you've felt uninspired or unproductive in your writing. What was going on in your life during that time? And how did you get back into flow?

While I was writing the most recent novel, I hit various dry spells, when it felt as though I was just plodding on. I think a lot of it was about the fact that it had a more complicated plot than my previous projects, and it's hard to hold onto the creative thread of a novel when you're having to produce multiple excel spreadsheets to keep track of who knows what about who and when and where!

What emotional state (calm, excited, etc.) allows you to produce your best writing? What sort of art produces that emotion in you?

I usually listen to music while I'm easing into a writing session, but once I'm going, I switch it off, as it becomes a distraction. Every project has a song or two that seems to resonate, and listening to those songs, in particular, can get me into the right mood.

What sort of film/television inspires your writing the most: in-genre or out-of-genre? How do you ensure your new work, though inspired by something else, is as original as possible?

As I mentioned above, it's more about the style and execution than the genre. I like things that bring speculative elements close to our own world, eg sci-fi that doesn't feel too far removed from our time, or stories set in the real world, but with a twist to them.

Conclusion

Enjoying the art of others is an amazingly easy (not to mention entertaining) way of improving your writing. But if you're looking for more concrete, step-by-step instructions on how to get started, I encourage you to download the "ENJOY ART (CONSUME)" Training Sheet. It's a PDF guide that will walk you through the drill with specific action steps, and it's totally free. You can snag it at engelwrite.com/trainingsheets.

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# Drill 6.2 – create Art

turn off-page creativity into on-page insight

Tell me if this has ever happened to you. You have an idea for your business or an insight into your personal life, and as you think about it, maybe opening a journal or word doc or something else, you find your thoughts restricted by the medium you're trying to express them in. So if you have an intuition about how to achieve a goal at work and you open your word processor, you're suddenly at a loss for how to put that intuition into words. What do you do?

In my experience, this problem usually means you've mismatched your thoughts and your medium of expression. Instead of a word doc to detail how to get to your goal, maybe you need a flow chart, or notecards laid out on the carpet. The point is that we can sometimes fall into ruts of thinking that are defined by how we express our thoughts. In the artistic realm, however, we have plenty of mediums through which to express our creativity. And in the survey, writers cited their work in other art forms as hugely contributing to their creative health, opening their minds to new approaches and ways of thinking, and pushing them toward personalized mastery in their writing.

So how do you capture the same benefits? This is the most wide open drill of the regimen—how you grow through the creation of art depends entirely on what calls to you. Maybe it's film or cinema or music or videogames. Whatever it is, it can pay dividends for your writing. If it's a form you're not normally active in, you'll probably be well beyond your comfort zone, and you'll have to concentrate in novel ways, using different parts of your brain. You'll get feedback in a new setting and discover artistic tendencies you didn't know you had, tendencies you can leverage while exploring your personalized path to writing mastery. You'll watch the more experienced artists in this realm, and you'll evolve your mental representation of what creativity means in this field, which will only deepen your overall creative approach. And throughout, you'll continue your experiments to strengthen and diversify your writer's toolbox, feeling your way toward an artistic identity, one beyond the page, and one that draws you back to it.

Okay. Maybe that all sounds like a stretch.

But there's clear value to having an eclectic interest in the arts. Consider Einstein. He claimed to live out his daydreams and thought experiments while he played his violin. There are pictures of him holding the instrument with terrible form, and mixed accounts of his skill level, but that's irrelevant. Music remained a central part of his thinking process, even though on the surface, it was so unrelated to his field of work.

That should be encouraging to us. We don't have to be a virtuoso violin player or breakout photographer to reap the benefits of a diverse artistic interest. We just have to follow our passion and tie it back to our stories, as Einstein tied his music to his thought experiments.

My experience with the drill

My background with creating art

I'm an only child, so from a young age I learned how to entertain myself, creating imaginary one-person games, drawing, or writing "songs".

When I got older, creating art felt natural, and I fell into friendships that made it easier. One friend in particular, Jacob, has really cleared the way for me, specifically in film and music. By "cleared the way", I mean he's removed potential barriers to entry from those fields. We could make films because he had a camera. We could record music because he had a software, and a mic, and an ear for sound. Access to art forms, in short, was not a problem.

It started with film. Whenever we had a school project, we would partner up (sometimes we weren't even in the same class, and one of us wouldn't get credit), I would jot down a script, and we would shoot. In our free time the structure would be more fluid, writing together, or making it up on the fly, getting his brother or another friend to film for us.

Next came music. It was almost inevitable, looking back. Jacob dove into music very young, and had built quite a skillset by the time we became friends. So after I'd been in front of his camera for a while, it seemed only natural I should be in front of a mic.

I decided on a field

Given the above history, this decision was easy for me. I doubled down on music. But "music" is pretty broad, so I narrowed it down to what I had always loved listening to, and always enjoyed creating: rap. More specific still, lyrical rap. This is what I would concentrate on. In the case of this art form, it's obvious how pursuing it can have a positive impact on one's writing. It was as if I had taken on poetry as a hobby, and I approached the writing of each verse with that mindset.

I made it easy (and fun) to create

This is largely thanks to Jacob, and another friend, Mark. Mark sends a beat. I write something that matches the flow and the feel. I record it with Jacob. And Jacob produces.

More important than the ease of pursuing the art form, though, is the enjoyment of it. To prevent myself falling off the wagon, I knew I had to look forward to each writing session. So I didn't put any pressure on myself to succeed as a rapper. I wrote songs _I_ wanted to write. I didn't care what other people thought or said. It was during this shedding of expectations that I realized how much pressure I'd been putting on my fiction writing. At some point, my goal of becoming published had converted my _passion_ to my _work_. Even though I was spending six hours per day on my fiction, I found myself needing a creative outlet. After starting your own artistic pursuit, you might discover the same need. It's healthy. Feed it.

I knew it was important not to make this a completely individual pursuit. The music was for me, sure, but I also wanted other people to hear it, to hear their feedback, and to improve as a result. So I sent my tracks to friends who appreciate hip hop, I noted down their thoughts, and I took it into account when I was working on my next project.

I processed and iterated

While I did treat music as an escape from writing, I also married the two together. I let myself draw parallels between the work. The build and crescendo of a beat. The acceleration of pace in a plot. The matching of language to those changes. Then I thought about how I could leverage my music even _more_ for my writing. The answer was simple: tell stories with my songs. It's been a tradition in rap for decades (these days, unfortunately, we see less of it), so it wasn't a forced fit; it was perfectly natural. Not only could I work on prose-level diction. I could also work on my storytelling skills, creating characters with much tighter word limits, creating an arc and a plot within vastly different constraints. Each song became like a short story, and I could get reps with multiple different techniques.

It was a natural fit for the art form, but it was far from easy. Each new song, each new narrative spun into a beat, was a new challenge, forcing me to live outside my comfort zone. This state of constant experimentation broadened my conception of story, stretching my MR to accommodate a more sensory, rhythmic view of narrative.

Reflections

There are endless crossovers between making music and writing, and I suspect there is a similar crossover between writing and many other forms of art. The key to finding that crossover is to concentrate on an element of the form that you can tie directly back to your writing (not to the extent that you're _thinking_ about writing while working on your other art, merely being aware of it), and experimenting with that element to push yourself beyond your comfort zone. Afterward, you can get pressure-free feedback, grow in the element, both in your writing and the other art form, and evolve your MR of creativity as a result.

The bestseller interview – Paul Cornell

Best known for his screenwriting on _Dr. Who_ , Paul Cornell is a British writer of science fiction and fantasy prose, comics and television, and he's been Hugo Award-nominated for all three media (a novelette, a comic book, and a television episode). You can check out Paul's eclectic range of work here: bit.ly/pcornell-books.

I'm curious about your schedule. How do you split your time between your multiple forms? Do you reserve Mondays for comics, Tuesdays for screen, and so on? Or do you focus for extended periods on a single project? What is the benefit of your chosen approach?

I run entirely by deadline, so I prioritise what needs to be done first. Then something will arrive that needs doing more quickly, and I'll switch to that. I have an ongoing mental (and sometimes whiteboard) holding pattern of what the most urgent thing to work on is.

What sort of mindstate prefaces your best work? Do you like to work from a place of calm, excitement, or somewhere in between? Does that preference change according to the form you're working in?

I feel most fresh when all other concerns are packed away, and I'm not worrying about my son or stuff that needs doing around the house. I can find the excitement myself, I need calm and quiet. My autistic trait of 'flapping' often helps me when I'm plotting. My body spasms about and I've built up a strong feedback loop of associating that physical excitement with new ideas. So I sometimes find myself walking around the room actively trying to trigger my autistic genes. Also, I tend to solve plot problems while brushing my teeth, for some reason, possibly connected to neurons in one's gut being activated by the expectation of food arriving via the stimulation of the teeth. And I get really depressed if I've done something on a previous page that's going to get in the way and won't work, so much so that my wife can now notice that particular form of 'I'm the worst writer in the world' and short-circuit it by telling me to go and look at the manuscript.

If you created only screenplays, only comics, or only prose, do you think you would be more successful in that form than you are currently, having split your time?

That's the question I ask myself all the time. Have I messed up my career by basically having fun doing all the different things I like? Every now and then I think especially that I should just be a novelist. It's an ongoing issue in my head.

In the course of creating in one form, have you ever learned something specific that could apply to one of your other forms? Maybe a scene you visualized for screen became a frame in a comic, or a description in a novel, or a certain style you adopted in one form manifested differently in another form?

I think writing comics made my TV writing better, in that I got more economical.

Aside from the art forms you've commercialized, is there any other kind of art you create as a hobby? Are you, say, a closet Bob Ross, or aspiring Eric Clapton?

There's nothing I actually do, but I would love to have the time and opportunity to become a painter. I'm a great fan of modern art, and I'd love to get enough art history under my belt to know what I'm in conversation with, and have a go at doing that properly. I create little abstracts of my own on a program on my tablet, but they're nothing I'd want to share.

Conclusion

Creating in an art form other than writing can help you discover your creative passion, free you from the pressure you put on yourself, and inform your overall artistic approach.

But maybe you'd like a more concrete framework to make the most of your art. If so, you can download the "ENJOY ART (CREATE)" Training Sheet. It's a PDF guide that will walk you through the drill with specific action steps, and it's totally free. You can snag it at engelwrite.com/trainingsheets.

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# Drill 7 – Live

use life to sharpen your writing instincts

Imagine you're camping and want to make a fire. What do you do? Do you gather firewood, or do you skip the firewood to save time for making the actual fire? It's the same for your writing. If you stay in your writer cave to save time for writing your stories, you'll have no material, no fuel, and you'll end up without sparks.

The Writers' Survey has a suggestion to avoid this, and it's to _leave_ your cave, to get out and live. There's no better material to fuel your writing journey, to accelerate your improvement and deepen your stories, than life.

First of all, this is not a chapter telling you how to live. At 25 years old, I don't have much wisdom to offer in that area. But with the help of the survey, I do have some ideas about how to optimize your life for your writing. The first step is to concentrate on the details around you. The next time you go to your favorite coffee shop, notice the woodgrain on the tables. The way a band of light falls through the window and narrows and dulls the farther it goes in. Be present, and be writing things down to store up for later.

After you're paying attention you'll have all the material you'll ever need, because there's no better way to evolve your mental representations of stories than to exist in the greatest story of ever told: life. Character and plot and setting _are_ the world. All we have to do is view it as writers, and work to absorb that realism into our craft.

Think about Hemingway. His hunting scenes were so real and vivid because in real life, he was a hunter. _The Old Man and the Sea_ rings true with every sentence because he was a deep sea fisherman, because he lived in Cuba and spent time with sailors. He knew the plot and the setting and the character because he had _lived_ all of them.

And the best part of this strategy ... is that you _have_ to do it. Living just comes with the territory of being human. So what have you got to lose by being more present and using your life to inspire your writing?

My experience with the drill

My background with living

Well, it goes back to February 22, 1995. Writing, however, didn't become a serious part of the picture until the winter break of my senior year in high school. And even then I hadn't considered writing as a career. I hadn't actually considered any careers, because the world was supposed to have ended on December 21, 2012, before I graduated, so why should I have spent all that time planning? Then, alas, the sun rose on the 22nd, and I was left without a future. What did I decide? On a particularly ambitious Thursday morning, 7:40am, December 27th, 2012, I decided to become a writer.

An epiphany in the Writers' Survey

In the 1,000+ answers I received to my question: "How do you get better at writing?", one of the categories of answers turned out to be, simply, "live". Get out in the world and have experiences, see things, talk to people. This surprised me. I'd always thought those things only took time away from the real work of writing. But after reading different iterations of this advice, it slowly sank into my thick head. I'd been cooping myself up, staying inside, isolating myself, and wondering why my writing felt stale and uninspired. I realized I needed to change my priorities: first live, _then_ write.

To get myself started down this new path, I decided to do something way out of my comfort zone: go on a road trip. I'd never travelled much before, definitely never alone, and my car is far from the poster child for reliability (at least, in most people's minds—in mine, she's a sure bet every time).

The trip would take 50 days, and would take me to 50 different independent bookstores along the way.

The original purpose of the journey was to deliver copies of my self-published book and ask for bookseller feedback. That purpose alone was worth the drive, but that's not all I got out of it. I revived my passion for local bookstores, and, most importantly, for life.

(If you want to watch the music video I made about the trip, you can check it out at https://youtu.be/GmtBlrLnHps)

The experience of the trip played a big role in this revival, of course, but an equally important factor was my mindset. I had been cooped up in my parents' house for a year and a half to this point, rehabilitating a back injury, rarely seeing friends, almost never leaving the house. So I undertook the trip with a determination to soak up all the life I'd missed, to be present in each moment, and, in short, to concentrate on the world around me. The result was a continual evolution of my various fiction MRs. Here's what I'm talking about.

Since reading the advice of writers in the survey, I've tried to live my life in a way to evolve my MRs of the three main components of story: plot, character, and setting.

The trip's lessons about plot

There was conflict—figuring out where to sleep: my car in a Nebraska parking lot, a tent in a Kansas windstorm. There was a theme—a willingness to help not only from friends but from complete strangers. And there was a structure—while reflecting on the trip, I unearthed a pretty clear three-act arc, so clear, in fact, that I'm planning a novel around it.

The trip's lessons about character

Glance again at that picture above, the one of my route. It's a long trip. I said I took it alone, but that's not entirely true. Sure, I was in the car alone, but everywhere else, at nearly every stop I made, I had a friend waiting with the door open. Or a gas station clerk giving me directions. Or a bookstore owner chatting and recommending stores down the road. I talked to more people, and a wider range of people, in these 50 days than I had in the prior two years. Is it any wonder, then, that the most recurring comment I got from beta readers on the book I revised after getting back, was how deep and developed the characters were? I had conversations with people. I heard their backstories. And I added it all to my MR of character.

The trip's lessons about setting

Staring at my living room wall while I was writing, surprisingly, didn't pump me full of inspiration. And it definitely didn't expand my sensory vocabulary. I couldn't describe different places as if I'd been there, because I hadn't been many places. That's not to say travelling is the only way to get better at describing setting. Even travelling, if you don't concentrate on the world around you, will be unproductive. So that's the key: concentrating, being present, observing. All I'm saying is, when you have interesting places to pay attention to and be present in, observing is a lot more fun.

Reflections

I needed a really big push before realizing something really obvious: the life you live affects the fiction you write. Since the survey, and since the trip, I've tried to remember that. Whenever possible, I try to make the effect my life has on my writing a positive one. I do this by concentrating on the world, people, and action around me, and building these memories into my MR of fiction. In short, I live first, then I write.

The bestseller interview – Andy Weir

Andy Weir is a computer programmer and American novelist. His debut novel, _The Martian_ , was later adapted into a film directed by Ridley Scott, and earned him the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2016.

You can check out Andy's latest science-fiction novel, _Artemis_ , about a heist story set on the moon, here: bit.ly/weir-artemis; and his latest graphic novel, _Cheshire Crossing_ , about Alice, Wendy, and Dorothy teaming up to save the multiverse, here: bit.ly/weir-cheshire.

When did you first view writing as something you could "practice" and get better at? How did that view influence your initial approach to the craft?

I'm not sure. I think I'd always felt like it was a skill like any other. I started writing when I was a teenager. And I noticed that the more I did the better I got at it. I guess it was just sort of self-evident.

I'm not sure how it influenced my approach to the craft. Though I suppose it made me realize that to get good writing you need to do a lot of writing. That's usually self-evident to most people but it wasn't to me right at the start.

Are there specific areas or activities in your life that you credit with improving your writing? How have they done so?

Having no friends or social life helped a lot. :-)

I'm only half joking, there. I had moved to Boston for work and didn't really know anybody.

So I did a lot of writing in my copious free time. That's when I started writing the Martian.

In any life experience, was there a moment of realization when you learned something about yourself, or developed something in yourself, that has allowed your writing to improve? How did that realization come to you, and how did you make the most of it?

I guess it was around the time other people started really liking my book. I didn't take writing too seriously up until that point. It was just a hobby. But once the sales of the ebook version started skyrocketing I realized I had a skill that other people enjoyed.

How did working full time affect your craft? How did you optimize your writing time around your "real job", and how would you recommend aspiring writers to draw from/leverage their work for their writing?

Well, you have to make time for writing if that's what you want to do. As I mentioned earlier, I didn't have much of a social life outside of work so it wasn't difficult for me.

Nowadays I have a wife and a special needs dog and a bunch of other social obligations. So work life balance is actually an issue at times.

Conclusion

Living life is a prerequisite to becoming a great writer. In fact, it's a prerequisite for just about everything. But, it can get messy and chaotic, so sometimes it's nice to have a concrete framework to help you optimize your life experiences for your writing. You can download that framework in the form of the "LIVE" Training Sheet. It's totally free, and you can access it at engelwrite.com/trainingsheets.

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# Turning Drills into Habits

When I saw the trends in the Writers' Survey that would later form the 7 Drills, I was excited. I had already familiarized myself with deliberate practice, so at that point, I had all the tools I needed to take my writing to the next level. But for several months, I didn't. Why?

The gap between knowing something and applying it is a wide one. I _knew_ the 7 Drills. I _knew_ the principles I needed to keep in mind while practicing them. But I didn't apply that knowledge. I didn't turn the drills into habits. That's what this final chapter is about, learning from my slow start and converting your knowledge into action.

The sequence of the drills

In the book, I explore the drills and sub-drills in order of their popularity in the Writers' Survey. But is that the order you should work on them in? It certainly can be. And if you're starting to feel overwhelmed by all this structure, keeping it simple might be your best bet. But if you're looking for the extra edge to better your craft and vanquish your publishing demons, read on.

Without the wisdom of the writers in the survey, the 7 Drills would not exist. But I couldn't let the method stop there, because I knew there must be a framework that would optimize our learning even more. I found it in a book called _Mastery_ , by Robert Greene.

There are three phases to mastery, Greene says, apprenticeship, creative-active, and mastery. We're in the first phase, with a slight overlap into the second, so that's where we'll focus. The apprenticeship phase is comprised of three steps, observation, practice, and experimentation. These steps will allow us to do our drills in the perfect sequence.

Let me step back. We're getting into the weeds again, but stay with me. The framework will make a lot more sense in the coming pages, and we'll drive it home with a concrete, black and white schedule, no more talk of principles or phase frameworks, only action. So as we do a flyover of the apprenticeship steps, don't worry about holding all the details in your head. I got you.

OBSERVE:

the warm-up workout

If our last step in this journey we're on is mastering fiction writing, what's our first step? Most of us answered that question intuitively from a young age: we observed the craft. It's how we developed the desire for mastery of writing in the first place. But according to the writer survey, when we rushed to dive into our own creations, we lost out on a faster, more fulfilling path of improvement. If you have the discipline to slow down, seeing the depth of these observation methods, you can speed up your learning and build a stronger foundation than the impatient writers around you.

Before we get to the details, however, I want to mention the two deliberate practice principles we'll be focusing on in this warm-up workout. First, during all of the observation drills, you need to concentrate intensely and approach your work with intention. To _see_ the masters' work won't help you; you need to _observe_ it _._ The second principle you need to focus on is evolving your mental representations of good writing. When you're reading or studying or hand copying passages, you're reinforcing how it _should_ be done, and forming comprehensive models of every part of the craft.

But to abide by these principles, as I've said, requires slowing down, and that's probably not what you want to hear. It's more fun to get straight to creating, and to expect your work to be exemplary right out of the gate.

Unfortunately that's not how it works, and because I'm from Indiana, I have a basketball analogy to explain why. The summer I was going into high school, two elementary schoolers down the street came over every day to play basketball with me. The boy insisted we put the goal up to ten foot, and he heaved the ball up to the hoop without practicing his form. The girl, on the other hand, agreed to play with a smaller ball and listened to my critiques of her shooting stroke. Guess who improved more that summer? The same philosophy is true in writing. If you take time to observe how the more experienced writers do things, your improvement will come much faster. And this is true even for writers who have already been honing their craft. I grew up reading like crazy, and I started writing in high school thinking I'd done all the observing I would ever need. But my skill level quickly went stagnant. I hadn't taken time to understand the nuances of observation. That's exactly what we'll talk about in the warmup workout.

But this isn't hard homework. If you truly love writing, soaking in the greatness of writers who've come before you should be a reward, not a punishment. And more than that, it gets you one step closer to building the most sturdy, most efficient foundation for becoming the best writer you can be.

Drills for observation

Some of the drills are all about observation. I like to think of them as the osmosis drills, the ones that help you _absorb_ knowledge. Below are the drills that fit this mold.

Read

Study

Write (copywork)

Enjoy Art (consume)

Live

ACQUIRE SKILLS:

the practice workout

Observing the craft of writing from the outside is not enough. Even doing the actual _writing_ isn't enough. Your progress in the craft will flatline unless you do the drills in the Practice Workout. After applying the necessary principles of deliberate practice, however, you can change that, and you can accelerate your improvement to an exponential rate.

So what _are_ those principles? In addition to the ones we focused on during our warm-up workout—to concentrate, and evolve our mental representations—there are two others we'll cover throughout our practice drills. First, we'll need to leave our comfort zones—practicing means pushing ourselves. And second, after we produce work of our own, we need to get feedback. This is important because our MR of the craft—our idea of what works and what doesn't—isn't quite developed yet, so we need the guidance of external expertise.

Okay, I know the idea of doing writing drills is less appealing than just starting the novel you've been thinking about. So why can't we get better while also cranking out chapters?

Here's my answer. While you're doing your practice drills, you definitely _should_ be working on your long form project, but working _only_ on that project is a recipe for disaster. I wrote my first novel when I was 17 without having written much else before that. Version one was horrible. Version two was horrible. And versions three through _seven_ were also horrible. I put so much time into the story without ever having a full toolbox of skills to draw from. Then, after starting the practice drills, I returned to that novel for version eight, and when I did a full rewrite everything just clicked—because I finally had all the right tools. So I encourage you to be patient with yourself. Give yourself time to acquire the necessary knowledge and skillsets, and I promise you'll be better off in the long run.

But again, as long as your focus is on getting better with the practice drills, you can and should work on your novel.

So now that we understand our overarching goals in the practice workout, we're prepared to step out of our comfort zones, to create our own work and get feedback, and accelerate our path toward mastery.

Drills for acquiring skills

Some of the drills are all about acquiring skills. These are the drills when you put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, and you work. Below are the drills that fit this mold.

Write (short form)

Edit

Get Feedback

EXPERIMENT

the play workout

What happens to a basketball player who does nothing but drills? He can work on his ball handling and shooting and passing till the cows come home, but if he never actually plays the game, he won't know how he's progressed. In fact, he won't have progressed as quickly as if he he'd been playing all the while. And most importantly, doing the drills doesn't allow him to find his personality as a player. He might have strengths and weaknesses, sure, but there's only one way he can find out who he is on the court ... and that's to be on the court.

In this workout you get to play around with your writing, to try new things, follow your instincts, and cement your voice. This is a style that's customized to you, the culmination of your observation and skill acquisition. You shouldn't expect to find your voice all at once, though. It'll come slowly, and we have to work to hone it through play and experimentation.

But I hear the concern as well. Won't _working_ to create a voice make it sound false? Isn't voice something that's supposed to develop organically?

Yes and no, and my logic comes once again from basketball. I'm sorry if you hate sports, but this is just how I think, so please bear with me 

Imagine two young point guards. They both have incredible ball handling skills, but both melt into the sea of other impressive players. At least, one of them does. The other _identifies_ that he has great ball control, and on top of his normal drills, he leans into that strength and begins making it his own. And in this exploration, he discovers his tendency toward a certain move: the crossover. So he works on it, and he keeps working until he does it with his own flare. So while the other point guard is just another face, our cross-over guy stands out with a style and unique personality, because he was intentional about developing both.

That's exactly what you should want for your writing. For my own craft, I've chosen one thing to work on to accentuate my voice: the cadence and rhythm of my prose. I love rap music, so I naturally write sentences that have something close to a beat, but I try to avoid anything that sounds sing-songy. That's the balance I'm trying to achieve and the style I'm trying to create for myself through playing with my writing. What about you? What could _you_ focus on that would clarify your style?

Drills for experimentation

Two drills are all about play and experimentation. They have greater space for failure, but that's not to be feared, for it's the exploration nearest danger that yields rewards. Here are the drills that give us room for experimentation.

Write (long form)

Enjoy Art (create)

Getting started

You now have all the tools I had in devising this practice method and writing this book. But I know some of you won't get as much joy as I do from this abstract, OCD categorizing, so let's get practical. How do you avoid the knowledge paralysis that gripped me after first learning this stuff? How do you get started?

Step 1: Divide your time between practice and project

You have a finite amount of time every day to spend on your writing, so it's important to divide that time between the project you're working on (for the purposes of below, we'll assume you're working on a novel), and your practice drills. Say you have two hours of writing time per day. Assign 1:40 of that to your novel and the remaining 0:20 to your drills. This might feel like you're sacrificing your novel time, and you are, but if I've done my job with this book, you'll know that sacrifice will be worth it.

Step 2: Schedule

I know scheduling might not always be possible, but when it is, it's a game changer. The old adage, "What gets scheduled gets done", is absolutely true. However you divide your time between your novel and your practice, make sure and give the activities daily time blocks. After a while, they'll become automatic.

Step 3: Prep

To increase the likelihood you'll actually practice, you need to remove as much friction as possible between yourself and practicing. Scheduling helps—you don't have to decide when to practice because you already know—but with extra preparation, you can remove most of the remaining friction. Designate a place in your apartment or home for your drills. Leave your notebook there. Do as much as you can in advance so when you're ready, all you have to do is start.

To help with this, especially with the customizing of your drills, I created a PDF workbook. It does all the back-end prep work for you, and helps you start practicing. You can download it for free at

engelwrite.com/trainingsheets

Step 4: Arrange your drills

Which drills should you do? How often do you change them up?

Let's work backwards, first considering the Experimentation drills: Write (long form), and Enjoy Art (create). While you should bring to your novel a clear intention to get better, for the sake of scheduling, we won't classify this activity as practice but as "novel time". As for the other drill, Enjoy Art (create), you can certainly incorporate that into your practice time, but I've found it more liberating to schedule that as hobby time, something I do when the mood strikes, usually on the weekends. It's your call how regimented you want to be with your art.

With those caveats, our practice time will consist of the Observation and Skill Acquisition drills.

To minimize set up and maximize focus, I recommend doing each drill for a week at a time. Your schedule may look something like this.

Week 1 – Read: short stories by Edgar Allen Poe (take notes)

Week 2 – Study: _Bird by Bird_ by Anne Lamott

Week 3 – Write (copywork): first paragraphs of the HP books

Week 4 – Enjoy Art (consume): watch interviews with famous painters

Week 5 – Live: chart a life experience into a structured story

Week 6 – Write (short form): write a flash fiction piece from a prompt

Week 7 – Edit: revise your flash fiction

Week 8 – Get Feedback: post your writing in a Facebook group and respond to comments

All the while, you'll be working on your novel. And in your free time, perhaps on the weekends, you can create in your other art form(s).

After your eight weeks, or however long you choose to make the cycle, give yourself a break from practice and go full tilt on your novel for a week or two. Then return to your practice notebook, come up with a new set of drills, and start again.

Helpful resources

I'm a longtime productivity addict and habit machine, so it was an effort to keep the above section short. If you'd like to see me go full geek mode on how to optimize your schedule for your practicing, you can check out my blog post on the subject at

 engelwrite.com/blog/how-to-practice-your-writing.

Or if you would like some extra help customizing your drills, you can download the PDF guides at

engelwrite.com/trainingsheets.

#

# Conclusion

Well, you made it. You started with a difficult acknowledgement: that your writing needs improvement. Then you answered the question of _how_ to improve. Starting with the Writers' Survey and applying principles of deliberate practice from "Peak", you learned the three-step structure of the apprenticeship phase outlined in "Mastery", culminating in the fastest, most efficient method to get better at writing fiction.

Now it's time to use that method. Your personalized practice regimen is already charted out for you in the training sheets—all you have to do is start training. I guarantee you if you commit to deliberately practicing your writing, you'll be amazed by the results. Your stories will click and your readers will fly through them. You'll get more sales and more five-star reviews. Or maybe that agent you've been trying to get will finally request to see your full manuscript. And then, who knows? All I ask is that you give practice a chance.

So, I'm almost out of here, but first, I want to address something.

You might remember from our review of deliberate practice that we left out two principles (hyper-targeting individual skills and weaknesses, and building a system for continuous improvement). Also, you probably noticed that we covered only the first phase of mastery: apprenticeship (leaving out the creative-active and mastery phases). I haven't forgotten about these topics, and in the future I hope to explore them in more detail. For now, though, you have everything you need to get started 

So that's it. Thanks for sticking with me through this book. Thanks for learning. And thanks for resolving to fulfill your potential as a writer. I truly believe we should aspire to become our best selves in all spheres of life, especially in one as important to us as writing. That's what this system is all about. I created it because I think the conventional approach to getting better at writing is holding you back, and I want to change that.

Thank you again for hearing me out, and happy training.

# About the author

Howdy, I'm Mason Engel. I'm passionate about stories, and I live out that passion with three main projects. I write. I teach writers how to improve their writing. And I advocate for local bookstores.

Writing

I've written eight science-fiction novels and countless short stories. My self-published novel, _2084_ , is available on Amazon. I'm currently submitting my latest manuscript to literary agents.

Teaching writers how to improve

EngelWrite.com is where I post all of my practice systems and improvement tips. I'm excited to grow the site and spread the power of deliberate practice.

Advocating for local bookstores

In 2019, I took a road trip from Indiana to California and back, visiting 50 indie bookstores in 50 days. Currently, I'm planning a second trip, which I will document much more rigorously, and use as the basis for a documentary on the importance of indies.

For fun

Other than working, I like screenwriting, travelling, playing soccer, playing basketball, running, lifting weights, watching stand-up, listening to audiobooks, rapping, and spending time with friends and family.
