Getting Better All The Time

What’s your plan for getting better at writing?

Do you have a plan?

Or are you going to write another novel that’s sort of like the last novel you wrote … and hope for the best?

Hey, I’ll cop a plea:

Guilty.

I will say my most recent book (2018) is substantially better than the first published book (2007) and light years better than my early unpublished novels back in the 1980s and 1990s.

And I didn’t really have a plan. I just kept writing. And, of course, reading and attending workshops (on random topics).

In general, I think this essential equation is true:

The more you write, the better the quality of what you produce. The better your craft.

Or, put another way—the more your write, the better your ability to tell the story in your head..

But … what are you working on? What’s your weakness? What’s your strength?

One reason I’m thinking along these lines is a book called The MVP Machine by Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik.

The book offers a detailed, deep dive into individual baseball players who are working—with enormous amounts of intensity and focus—at getting better. We’re talking obsession. For instance, pitchers who throw more in the off-season than they do during the summer.

The portraits of individual players who bear down, coupled with their ability to self-analyze, is inspiring.

These MVP-level pitchers don’t throw thirty or forty pitches and call it practice, for instance. They focus intensely (there’s that word again) on sometimes minuscule changes in the movement of their body or their grip on the ball—each practice pitch thrown with purpose to study what works.

Or doesn’t.

I couldn’t help but think how the model would work with writing.

If we want to get better at something that we care about, even if art can’t be measured like a sport, shouldn’t we focus on getting better at the individual elements within the craft?

Even as we write the next novel, shouldn’t we prioritize a specific aspect of our craft and bear down? Work at getting better?

What if we worked for a month, intensely, on dialogue? And the next on character descriptions? And the next on writing with empathy and emotion? On and on.

And if you don’t think you’ve got a weakness, check your reviews. (Or your sales.) Or check the feedback from your critique group. Or check the feedback from your beta readers. Is there a common theme? Why not come up with a plan to improve that specific aspect of the thing you love to do? Why not a bit more purposeful about your plan of improvement?

And work a bit more on your grip and grasp of improving your storytelling style?