My music teacher in middle school said something similar that I will never ever forget... she said, "Practice does not make perfect, practice makes PERMANENT. If you practice poorly, you will perform poorly."

James Clear got his info from Anders Ericksson, who was the psychologist who studied deliberate practice and from whom Malcolm Gladwell misinterpreted the "10,000 hour rule." His book, Peak, is a fabulous read and very inspiring. He didn't believe there was such a thing as prodigy, only interest and deliberate practice.

This is the best writing advice channel on KZfaq.

I improve constantly because even when I am not sitting in front of the typewriter pounding out words, I'm absorbing information from other sources, turning it over and over in my mind, integrating it and seeing how it shows itself in the actual act of writing. I don't consider writing to be something that, one day, I'll simply say: ok, this is the formula. I'm human, so there are so many ways that my writing, my expression, intersects with other areas of my life and the larger world at large, so with each iteration, I become in some ways a new writer, a different writer, expressing from a new perspective that flavors my understanding of the world, my surroundings and myself. Here is a skill that I think is important: (Using Story Grid terminology) - How does the writer transform a blue level or red level of perception into a green level without directly referencing blue or red. I think this is an important skill because very often we are using scene analysis to reverse-engineer a scene to see why it works and how it works, and yet I find that I still sometimes struggle with understanding (for myself) how to differentiate the levels of perception that appear, line-by-line, in a scene I'm reading when the obvious signposts ("feel", "think" etc) are not present.

Tim, you're our kind of 'nuts,' absolutely passionate about what you do. Thank you for that.

"I'm kind of nuts." We few, we happy few...

My deliberate practice is this: I write 500 words and have a Story Grid editor check my progress with the goals we have on my individual skills. It has ACCELERATED my growth.

Deliberate practice follows from the deep inner knowledge that your first draft is a steaming pile of sparkly garbage...eventually you're left with more sparkle and less garbage to begin with.

Great food for thought. I really enjoy your topic and delivery. Thank you.

So happy to come across this video today, thanks Tim!!

Do you think that getting feedback from AI is a good way to improve? I'm thankful for your vid, you speech helped me think of lots of things and get myself back. Thank you again ❤

Curious if anyone has used/heard of Ready Chapter 1? They are doing a book publishing contest deal and wasn’t sure how legit it was…if so I’ll be dropping all this knowledge I’ve been learning here on Story Grid to blow some minds.

My writing has improved 99.9% but word choice and sentence structure is still shit unfortunately 😊

So…math was never my strong suit, but how does a daily 1% increase work out to being 37 times better in a year? Are there 3700 days in a year where you live? Or maybe you meant to say if you did this everyday for 10 years, which is the typical amount given for 10,000 hours to mastery?

Every time I hear "valenced language" it makes me roll my eyes. Otherwise, this is fairly useful.