A couple of weeks ago I started attending a weekly wall climbing workshop at my local climbing hall (stay with me; it’ll tie into writing fiction further down). I didn’t know what to expected, how we were going to practice, how much feedback we’d get. I wasn’t even sure I would learn anything at all since I’ve been climbing for nearly two years now without really getting much better since those early leaps you take whenever you start a new hobby. So, yeah, I’d stagnated, and the workshop was a last desperate attempt at not sucking at my hobby.
I’d only spent half an hour at the first session of the workshop, though, when I realized that what I’d been doing until now was naïve practice, the kind that leaves you plateauing pretty quickly in your skill development. What I needed was, of course, deliberate practice, and that was what the workshop was all about.
Wall climbing has two basic categories. The first is climbing tall walls where you climg long routes with multiple problems. This is the kind of climbing I’d mostly been doing. I started because I wanted to get over my fear of hights or at least tame it a bit, and I continued because, hey, it was actually quite fun.
The second kind of climbing is called bouldering. Here, the routes a much shorter, and you aren’t secured by a rope because you won’t get father up than you can just jump down on the matress. A bouldering route usually has one or two problems you need to figure out to succeed.
When I first tried bouldering, I had already started plateauing, but bouldering allowed me to increase my skill level. Why? Well, firstly because I didn’t have to deal with my fear of hights, which allowed me to focus on my techniques; it got me out of the red zone and to the place just outside my comfort zone where you’ll learn the most.
Secondly, it allowed me to practice the areas I’d difficulties with, without having to climb half the length of a tall wall first. It probably won’t surprise you either that bouldering was invented as a way for wall climbers to practice their skill before going out onto the big mountain routes.
The difference between climbing tall walls and bouldering is very similar to the diference between writing novels and short stories. When writing a short story, you can focus on practicing one or two skills, like the one or two problems on a boulder route. And if those parts turn out nicely, you can edited the other aspects of the story into something selable.
Of course, you can do the same with a novel, but if you’re praciticing one or two skills for the time it takes to write 80K words, you’re missing out on interweaving (the significantly added effect off shifting between different focus areas in your writing). And when you then have to edit the other areas of your story, that’s a lot of time you don’t spent practicing your weaknesses. This is because it’s way easier to keep the concept, character developments, and plot progression of a short story in your mind while focusing on one aspect of the story than it is with a beast of a novel.
So with a novel as with climbing tall walls, most of the practicing won’t actually focus on the areas you need to improve. And so the effect isn’t as great as with more concentrated practice.
But, wait a minute, didn’t you say that you had plateaued when you started the workshop? Also, wasn’t this post going to be about writing exercises? Yes, and yes. And that’s where things get really interesting. Because the workshop I’m taking doesn’t really focus on bouldering specific routes.
Only about 10% of the practice is climbing routes, and it’s most mostly to keep us motivated because effective practice isn’t really much fun.
90% of it is is making different types of movements on the walls, applying differen techniques, and having skilled instructors watch you climb and indentify where you need to improve (or in my case, where I need to improve the most). They then introduce you to exercises which challenge that specific sub-skill of climbing, watch you do the exercises and give you feedback along the way.
This is deliberate practice.
Comparing this form of practice to writing, it doesn’t correspond to neither novels or short stories. No, to practice in this highly efficient way, you’ll need to apply writing exercises. Short stories can be used, but usually you’ll end up focusing too much on the end product rather than on the practicing part, and you won’t be able to focus as efficiently on one particular sub-skill at a time as you can in an exercise.
First, identify you weaknesses; if possible, get some feedback from more skilled writers/editors on what they are. Maybe you have a writing group or some well read friends who can help. Then, find writing exercises focusing on those sub-skills. Perform the exercises. Get feedback on your performance (this is the difficult part when it comes to writing; often, we only have ourself to provide the feedback, unfortunately). And repeat until your weaknesses become your strengths.
I know, I know. Many aspiring writers despise writing exercises as if they were the devil himself. And, yes, there are some sub-skills (like interweaving plots or creating long character arcs) that are difficult to practice in exercises or even in short stories. But for most skills related to writing fiction, exercises is the most effective way to get better. (I’m not saying you shouldn’t write stories, just that avoiding writing exercises is doing yourself a disfavor).
This is the form of practice that helped me improve more as a climber in one month than I had in the previous year. And this is the form of practice that took me from being an unpublished amateur who didn’t know what he was doing, who was improving at a slower rate than his peers, and who frankly wasn’t getting much better at all and turned him into someone who could publish in a pro-paying magazine in just about a year.
Toby Backman 