Re: the expert mind


"Ben Crowell" <"crowell06 at lightSPAMandISmatterEVIL.com"> wrote in message
news:pbOdnfDBz8ce6FPZnZ2dnUVZ_qKdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
There was an article in last month's Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=00010347-101C-14C1-8F9E83414B7F4945
about the expert mind. It makes some interesting statements that I think
might apply here:

1. As a rule of thumb, any new skill takes about 10 years of systematic
effort to become expert at.

I think the important bit of that is *as a rule of thumb.* Meaning, it
doesn't work that way for everybody, but if you don't yet know how it works
for you, it's a place to start your assumptions from.

2. Most people fail to achieve the expert level because they reach a
certain point, and then don't push themselves to go beyond it.

I'd certainly accept that as a major contributing factor in a lot of cases.

To
continue improving, they need to keep on attempting tasks that are
just a little bit too difficult for them to succeed at.

And that strikes me as just plain common sense. Combined, to me, the two
add up to "People are lazy," which also has a certain amount of plausibility
to it...

3. Experts are more efficient at their tasks partly because they have a
large amount of knowledge that's efficiently indexed in their brains.

Maybe. Depending on how you define knowledge and indexing and a bunch of
other stuff. A lot of physical skills seem to me to require muscle-memory
more than efficiently-indexed information, for instance. But perhaps that's
just nit-picky.

Re 1, I'm curious what other people here do to keep themselves
productive.

*** in chair, fingers on keyboard. There really aren't any shortcuts.

Discipline and persistence are the top two traits necessary to any
successful professional writer. Been sayin' it for years...

If we assume that ten years is what it really will take for
me to reach my goal of becoming proficient, then I obviously can't
be productive only 20% of the time, because then the time would
expand to 50 years.

In my lexicon, "proficient" is not as high a level as "expert."
Furthermore, a lot of the timing depends on how you're defining "expert."
Back when I was a starry-eyed wannabe, anybody who'd published something was
an expert as far as I was concerned. Then *I* published something, and I
realized I wasn't suddenly and magically an expert, no matter what it looked
like to the other starry-eyed wannabes who hadn't broken in yet; no, I was
now, once again, a rank beginner, on the bottom rung of a whole new ladder
(this one labeled "professional writers" rather than "unpublished writers").

I'm a teacher, so I tend to get in most of
my writing over the summers, and I'm not sure that's enough,
although I guess I've accomplished at least something over the
three years I've been working at it (a novel, and a novelette
I've just completed).

I wrote my first five (published) novels mostly on my lunch hour and
weekends. And there are a number of professional writers who work naturally
in a sort of boom-and-bust cycle. Whether writing during summers will work
for you or not depends on you -- how much you put into it, how seriously you
take it, etc.

One psychological barrier I'm experiencing is that if I sit down at
the computer to write, there are too many other tempting things
to do on the computer. Do other people have this problem?

A better question is, does anyone *not* have this problem? :)

That's why discipline is top of the "necessary traits for writers" list.
You need it for more than just sitting down to write.

I wrote most of the novelette on a family vacation, in pen, when I
didn't have internet access. One way of keeping fiction writing
on the radar during the school year might be weekly participation
in critters, I guess, but I'm not sure if that would evolve into
something that would take time away from writing, rather than
adding to it.

The only way to find out is to try it.

There are lots of tricks, ranging from computer programs that refuse to give
you access to distractions, or that pop up timers to remind you to get back
to work, to writing by hand, to hauling a laptop to a coffee shop, to
writing a novel in daily e-mails to a helpful friend who has been suitably
bribed to nag if you miss a day.

The main thing to remember about during-the-year writing is that you don't
*have* to sit down for two or three hours at a time and write a whole
chapter, or even a scene or a page. A paragraph a day, or even less, will
get you an amazing amount of production if you actually *do* it every day.
When my life gets totally crazy, I've been known to drop my writing quota to
one or two sentences per day, just so I'd be sure to do *something*. It's
easy to say you haven't got time to write a chapter or a scene or a page;
it's a lot harder to say that you can't manage to squeeze out even one
sentence during a whole day. (The real trick here is, no sandbagging. That
is, you can do more than one sentence, but it never counts toward tomorrow's
production. You still need your page or your paragraph or your sentence on
that day, too.)

Maybe I'm different
from most people in that I seem to work best by writing a complete
outline, and then making it more and more detailed until it becomes
the completed story. I just can't do it by the seat of my pants.

It's not a unique method. And it can actually be remarkably well-suited to
working on writing when one doesn't have a lot of time or attention on a
daily basis to devote to it. One of my friends, housebound with two
toddlers, used to spend a week or two making "notes" -- essentially,
starting with the usual five-to-ten-page plot outline, taking the first few
sentences and fleshing them out into a half-page chapter summary, and then
taking *that* and fleshing it out into a more detailed two-page chapter
summary, and then just scribbling down bits of dialog, necessary set-up,
plot twists, description, whatever came to mind as she chased her kids
around. And then, at the end of two or three weeks, she'd offload the kids
on her spouse for an afternoon and go to the library and write up the notes
into a coherent chapter.

On both critters and rasfc, there are
clearly a lot of people at a lot of different levels, and I would
consider myself to be somewhere in the middle. One of the things I've
learned as a teacher is that students only really learn anything when
the instruction is at just the right level of difficulty. If it's too
high, they can't accomplish anything, and if it's too low, they aren't
learning anything new.

I don't think I've ever learned much about writing from reading about it. I
learn from practicing it, and I learn from explaining it to other people
(who, I devoutly hope, *do* get something useful out of reading the
resulting explanation).

The thing about crit groups -- and rasfc -- is that the discussion mostly
focuses on what a specific writer wants/needs to know about. If you're on
the receiving end of a crit or a question-answering session, you're usually
not getting a bunch of generic "everybody needs to know this" sort of
advice; you're getting comments and critique that are specific to your
particular question or piece of writing. And if you're giving the crit, you
get out of it what you put into it.

Ultimately, though, it still comes down to trade-offs. If you have half an
hour a day to devote to your writing, and that's absolutely all the time you
can squeeze out of your schedule, and you spend all of it reading
rasfc...well, then, you're not spending it writing. Reading rasfc is often
fun and entertaining; social/support groups are as useful to many writers as
crit groups, if not more so. But if that's *all* you're doing with your
"writing time"...well, writers write. It's a definitional thing. If rasfc
is getting in the way more than it's helping, you need to be ruthless and
cut yourself off, if you ever want to actually get any writing done.

Patricia C. Wrede


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