It's time to fix the toxic writing world

We need to talk about the culture of the writing world because it's a mess. It's hurting writers and it needs to be fixed. So I could tell you story after story, but I'm just going to point out just 2 anecdotal things. The first is I recently ran a poll with 506 authors that answered to find out how long they've been working on their writing without having produced something publishable. The number that came out of that was 14.9 years. That was the average amount of time that a writer has been working on their writing and yet hasn't produced something publishable. Another anecdote. There's a writer I was talking to last week, and she was telling me that all of her friends were telling her to stop working on the actual craft of learning show versus tell, of learning how to do the 5 Commandments, of actually learning the craft, that it was just too hard. That's not how you learn to write. She should stop all of that and just pants the next draft of her novel. Now, mind you, these are all people that are pantsing all their novels and they haven't written anything publishable. And yet that's what she's being told that she should do. And that's where it'll actually help her write a publishable book. So this is the kind of common knowledge in the world of writing. This is what writers are told all the time, to just sit down, write 1,000 words a day, 2,000 words a day, pants your novel, maybe plot it out, structure it out, then just sit down and write it. We tell writers, well, you know, Anne Lamott says your first draft of anything is shitty and that you have to rewrite your book over and over. And so you have these writers that are on their 8th, 9th, 10th draft of a book after years, and it's still not anywhere near ready to be published. And then let's go back to that 14.9 years issue and let's just talk about that a little bit. Let's imagine you and I met, maybe we were standing in a long line for coffee at Starbucks and we started talking. And in that conversation I said, yeah, you know, I've been practicing the guitar for about 15 years. And you're like, oh, that's pretty cool. So then a few weeks later, we've continued to stay friends. I invite you over to a cookout at my house and you say, hey, you know, I'd love to hear you play something. So I go to get the guitar, and then what comes out is a barely passable version of Knockin' on Heaven's Door by Bob Dylan, which is easy to recognize as a song, but also one of the easiest songs to play on the guitar. And so you hear me play this, it's barely passable. The only reason you know it's the song Knockin' on Heaven's Door is because I told you before I started playing it. And so you're sitting there thinking and probably wondering what is going on here. And if you're brave enough, because, you know, maybe we're close enough friends by this point, you would probably say something to me like, I don't know what you've been doing to practice the guitar, but it's not working and you should probably try something different. Which would seem fair, right? If I'm practicing the guitar for 15 years and I'm not at least proficient at it, proficient enough to play a pretty good song in front of people, you would assume what I was doing wasn't working and I would need to do something else. And now let's apply that same logic to pretty much every other creative endeavor. Let's say I've been working on my dancing. I've been taking classes. I've been going to the dance studio. I've been working on it. And then you watch me try to dance and it is a complete train wreck. Or what if I said I've been working on woodworking for 15 years and I've been getting really good at it, practicing as much as I possibly can. And then you look at what I can actually build and I can barely put together like a box that you would even lay on your table, much less a chair or anything you would actually use. Again, you would wonder, hmm, I think what you're doing isn't working. Maybe you should try something else. And yet, in the writing world, we do not apply the same common sense appraisal. We don't apply that same logic. We tell writers that have been doing it for 14.9 years to just keep pantsing your novel. Maybe watch some more information on structure and plotting and character development, then write another draft. Or maybe that draft isn't working, try another book idea, but just sit down and start writing. Maybe one day it will click. Maybe one day you'll be able to do it. Why is this? Why is this the way that we approach this? That we allow this as writers, a part of this community. How do we allow this to go on without asking, why is it this way? And isn't there a better way to do this? So that's what I want to talk about, is this culture around just telling writers to keep churning for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, and maybe one day it will click. Let's talk about what this is and let's see if there's a way to actually fix it. So much of this thinking around writing comes from writers, like famous writers. You have Stephen King who says that you should write 1,000 words a day, do light editing, and then turn it in. In his book, he also says, if you're a bad writer, you can't become a good writer. He says that in that book too. Anne Lamott says this stuff. Ray Bradbury says this stuff. Neil Gaiman says this stuff. Even Hemingway has said stuff like this. And so this is where all of this kind of lore comes from, is all of these writers that say, well, you just keep doing it, just keep doing it, and then maybe one day it'll eventually But if it doesn't click, that just means you're a bad writer and you could have never done it anyway, which again doesn't make any sense. So instead of relying on this kind of anecdotal what one-off author says, what if we went back to science and research and see if that has anything to say about it? So this is what I did. So about a year ago, I went down this deep rabbit hole into the science of learning and how humans learn. I found all kinds of research dating all the way back to 1993, and it's been upheld over and over again. over and over and over, and I started finding some really interesting things. So we're gonna start with some research from 2015 from the economist and psychologist Robin Hogarth, and it's a paper on the 2 types of settings of learning, the 2 kind of environments of learning. There is the kind environment and the wicked environment. So let's look at the kind environment first. So inside of a kind learning environment, there's some different things working for you. The rules are very clear. What is working, what isn't working, what is right, what is wrong. The feedback is instant. So as soon as you make a mistake, you immediately get told that you're wrong. And the practice conditions, the conditions in which you are practicing, are very similar to the conditions in which you are performing. So in a kind environment, basically anyone can get proficient with the right kind of practice in a pretty reasonable time. So let's look at guitar, for example. The rules are pretty clear. If I want to play a song by Bob Dylan, he wrote that song a long time ago. All the notes are set. I just have to try to play those notes, play those chords. And if I make a mistake, it's instantly clear. I hear the wrong note and I at least know what I did wrong. So the feedback is almost instantaneous. And if there's a problem I can't fix, I can go to a guitar teacher and he can point out like, oh, this is what you're doing wrong. Here's how to fix it. I can practice that. I can get good at it because he can show me how to do it and show me how it should sound. The practice conditions are very similar to performing. So the same way I play the guitar alone in my room would be the same way I play the guitar up on stage. This is a kind environment. This applies to things like learning music, learning chess, where it's immediately obvious you're doing it wrong. You can get feedback very quickly. This would be learning how to swim. If you start doing it wrong, you start sinking. You immediately know you're doing it wrong. So that is a kind environment where you get the feedback instantaneous. The rules are pretty clear, and the same way that you would practice is the same way that you And again, inside a kind environment, as long as you're practicing and putting in the reps, you're going to get better. So the opposite of a kind environment would be a wicked environment. So this is where feedback is absent, delayed, partial, or worse, it's misleading. So if you don't get feedback or you don't get feedback right when you're practicing, or if you do get feedback, it's misleading. This is what makes a wicked environment. Also, it's a situation where when you try to do it right, You don't know if you got it right or wrong. You don't get that short feedback loop. And the feedback you get isn't letting you know immediately if you got it right or wrong. It can be kind of vague. And so what happens in a wicked environment is it's not just that you don't get better with more practice. It's that you tend to solidify the bad practice. And over time, you tend to think you're actually doing better. Than you actually are. So this would be something like investing, right? So if I want to invest in a particular stock, I won't know for years if I got that right or wrong. So it's really hard to get better at investing because the feedback is vague and doesn't come for a really long time. And if the stock happens to go up in the short term but then drops, you know, you got that misleading feedback all along the way. This would be the same thing like learning leadership is really hard. Because the feedback can be very misgiving. People can just tell you what they think you want to hear. You think you're doing fine, and then all of a sudden everybody starts leaving and they don't want to be a part of what you're doing, and you realize, oh my gosh, I'm a terrible leader. This kind of wicked environment creates a situation where you think you're doing fine, and yet you never make any real progress. Okay, so here's Hogarth's checklist. So if you were trying to decide what is a wicked environment, what is a kind environment, these are the 6 things that we're looking at. So the first one is setting match. Basically where you practice and where you perform, are they basically the same? So when we look at writing, this one's actually not so bad because whether you are good at writing or bad at writing, learning writing, already writing a publishable piece, it's pretty much the same thing. You're just sitting down at your desk and writing. So the setting match makes sense. Number 2 is feedback speed. Do you get feedback quickly? This is where it starts to fall apart for writing. So for most writers, we sit alone writing and writing and writing for months or even years before we get any feedback on any of it. And this is terrible for learning. The goal of feedback that actually makes you learn fast is to get when you practice and when you get feedback as close as possible. This is why learning the guitar is a kind environment, because if I hit the wrong note, I immediately know it. But in writing, you don't get feedback for months or years even. Then we go down to number 3, it's feedback accuracy. And this is even worse for writers. When you get feedback, if you get any feedback at all, it's almost always subjective and unclear. It is not precise and it is not always correct. So if you're in a writing group and you're asking your peer writers to give you feedback, the accuracy is going to be all over the place. So even if one person gives you good feedback, you're not good enough to know if that's the right feedback or what the other 3 people that said were wrong and subjective, if that's right or not. And then even if you take a manuscript to an editor, you've made so many mistakes in that manuscript, it's really, really hard for the editor to give you enough feedback because you are making so many mistakes all the way down at the sentence level, every scene level, the arc level. They're going to try to be helpful. And a lot of editors aren't good at their job. So even the ones that do give you feedback, the accuracy is not good, but the speed is terrible anyway. So that was number 3, feedback accuracy. Sample completeness is number 4. And this is, can you see outcomes of paths you didn't take? This is really hard in writing because you can't see the results of the stuff that you didn't write. So you want to be able to see like, whoa, here's all the different paths I could take. And you get to pick the one that works for you. You don't really have that in writing because you're making up a story. So sample completeness is really hard. Rule stability. So this is really interesting because what we have found at Story Grid is there is a clear methodology and set of rules that every story must abide by. They are not formulas. They are forms. There is clear working and not working stories. The problem is, first, not a lot of writers actually believe that. They think because it's creativity, you can do whatever you want, which again, doesn't apply to any other form of creativity. You can't just do whatever you want with woodworking and it works. That doesn't make sense. Same with dance, same with music. I can't just put my fingers randomly on the strings and play something and it's music. It's like, no, there's actual music theory. There are things that are objectively working music and objectively not working music. And writing is the exact same way. There are things that are objectively working with writing and not working with writing. But a lot of writers don't even believe that. And then if you do, who actually knows what those forms and rules are and how you apply them to writing. It's really, really hard to find somebody like that. Thankfully, at Story Grid, we have Sean Coyne. He has 35 years of experience. He's been doing this a very long time. His track record is impeccable in helping writers figure out how to tell a story. But without somebody like that in your corner showing you the rules, it's really hard to know what are the rules in writing and how do I apply them to my writing and how do I know if I'm doing them correctly. So number 5 was rule stability, and number 6 is pattern repetition. Do situations repeat in recognizable ways? So basically, if every time I play the C chord on the guitar, it sounds the same, that is a pattern repetition. Again, that's really hard to pull off in writing because every story is different. So if you take Hogarth's checklist, these 6 things, and you look at the landscape of writing through the checklist of those 6 things, writing is one of the most wicked environments to learn in. And this, this is what makes writing so hard. If you apply the research to to writing, you realize what we have created in our culture of writing is one of the most wicked environments to learn in, which is why you can go 10 or 20 or 30 years of practicing and not actually become good at the craft. And here's the thing I want you to hear. If you look at Hogarth's research, he doesn't say a wicked environment makes it harder to learn the skill. What he says is it's basically impossible to learn the skill inside of a wicked environment. Think about that. Writing is One of the most wicked environments there is. Therefore, it is almost impossible to learn it inside of that wicked environment. This is where we find ourselves in our current writing culture and how we talk about writers actually writing publishable works. Okay, if all of that, you're already realizing, oh my gosh, I've been practicing in a wicked environment for years. Is there anything I can do about this? The work we've done at Story Grid is to take that checklist and turn it into a kind environment. So we've worked really hard to create a situation at Story Grid where you can learn the skills of writing so you can write something publishable inside of a kind environment. So if you're interested in learning about how we do that at all, just go to storygrid.com/call. You're gonna fill out a quick application, book a time to talk with one of our author advisors, and they're gonna hear a little bit about where you are with your writing and then help you figure out if working with us might be a good fit for you. If not, we'll tell you what else you should do instead. It's just a free gift to you. It's absolutely free. Just book a call. It's 45 minutes, and we'll talk you through kind of where you're at with your writing, and help you get unstuck. We always ask people like how they feel at the end of the call and whether they end up working with us or not, the number one thing people say is they say they feel relieved 'cause at least they know what they need to work on next in their writing. So go to storygrid.com/call to book that call. But either way, let's keep going and look at how we can fix this culture around writing. All right, so if you go to Google right now and you search for like best books for writers or best books about writing or something like this, you're gonna find yourself on different forms of lists of all the books you should try to read. If you're trying to learn how to write. And if you look at the list on Goodreads, the number one most recommended book on that list is On Writing by Stephen King. This is on just about every book list I've ever seen for writers ever. So let's talk about this book because I think this is driving a lot of the culture, and a lot of the other books that are suggested to writers reinforce this kind of culture. Here's just one quote from Stephen King, and I'm going to put it up on the screen here: While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, it is possible to make a good Out of a merely competent one, so let's just translate that. What Stephen King is saying is that if you're a bad writer, there's no hope for you. You can't even become a competent writer, much less a good writer. He said that writers are born, not made; that he was born a writer, and you, if you're a bad writer, there's just no hope for you. And this is so deeply ingrained in the culture. The amount of times I hear writers talking about talented writers or the muse. Or waiting to have a breakthrough. It seems nuts, but that is what we are taught by this number one book for writers, is that if you're a bad writer, all we're trying to do is sit around and hope that maybe we're not a bad writer because there's no hope for us. Now, there's 2 problems with this. First is the anecdotal one, and I'm just going to use me as an example. In 2015, I started working with Shawn Coyne. We started the podcast together, the Story Grid Podcast, and he started coaching me. And if you go back to those early episodes, they're still up, and you listen to my writing, It was terrible. Like there is nobody that would read what I was writing and be like, "This guy's got talent. This guy's at least competent." No, I was a bad writer. In fact, the first time that Sean ever gave me feedback on my writing, his notes, just his notes on my scene, were four times longer than what I had actually written. And yet you fast forward a few years, and I wrote my novel *The Shithead*. It has sold thousands of copies. It has hundreds of reader reviews. It has a blurb from a New York Times bestselling author. It's a good book. You can. read it. Maybe you don't like the book itself, but it is well written. So I went from being a terrible bad writer to being at least a competent writer. I would say borderline good writer. So anecdotally, it doesn't make any sense because I prove it wrong. If you just find one person who was ever a bad writer and became a decent writer, it proves King wrong. But forget me, forget anecdotal. Let's look at the second exhibit here. The science. 3 decades of research on expert performance by Dr. Anders Ericsson and so many others. They show over and over and over that natural talent is not what separates good performers from bad. The only thing that matters is the type of practice. And I'm going to come back to that whole type of practice thing. Now, I'm not saying, and none of the science says, that there is no such thing as natural talent, right? There are always people that are naturally better at things than other people. What they're saying is it Doesn't matter over the long haul. It is the equivalent of starting a marathon with a one-foot head start. Yeah, sure, you're starting with a head start, but pretty quickly that doesn't matter. What separates good performers from bad performers is not natural talent; it is how they practice. And that brings me to the second quote from Stephen King's On Writing: If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot. Read a lot and write a lot. The advice every writer has heard 1,000 times at least is to write every day. King said you need to write at least 1,000 words a day, at least 6 days a week. Writers write, just produce words and just read a lot. And eventually that will turn into something. But again, let's flip this around. I've never played the piano and nobody says, well, just sit down and just start hitting the keys, trying to play something. And eventually you'll figure it out. I'm new to woodworking. Nobody would say, "Hey, just start grabbing some tools and cutting at some wood and trying to put things together. Maybe eventually you'll figure it out." No, whenever we learn something new, we start with a simple, small version. We get good at that. Then we build our skill a little bit at a time. And yet, what do we tell writers? Just sit down and write your novel. That is the exact advice that one doesn't make any sense in any other creative endeavor. We would tell somebody, "First you learn the basics, and then you build up from there." But when we tell people to just write the novel, that's like saying, "Hey, why don't you learn how to play?" the guitar by getting a bunch of people together, going out on stage, and just trying to play the guitar. Because if you're trying to sit down and write something that 10,000 people or 100,000 people you hope will end up reading it, that's performing. You're trying to perform before you've even practiced. The biggest problem is it violates all of the research that shows how humans actually build complex skills. Okay, so we've got these writers— I've talked to so many of them that have been working on their writing 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years— and we talked through kind of what they're doing, and I see this same loop showing up every single time. And so I'm going to describe the loop, and I just want you to think through, does this sound familiar? So you come up with an idea for something to write. Maybe it's a short story, maybe it's a novel. You sit down and you start working on the draft, and then somewhere in the middle, it kind of falls apart on you. So maybe you actually get through an entire draft, but when you go back and read it, you realize it's not working. So something goes wrong in the drafting. So then you decide, okay, I need to get better at this whole writing thing, so I'm gonna go learn some stuff. So you buy some craft books, maybe On Writing by Stephen King. Maybe you read Save the Cat or The Snowflake Method or Bird by Bird. You buy all these craft books, you read them, you take notes. Maybe you go to some trainings, you take a 90-day online course on how to write your book or how to structure your book. You take a class on character development. You go to masterclass.com and listen to all this stuff from famous writers. And as you're doing this and you're learning all of this stuff, your confidence starts to grow. It's like, oh, okay, now I understand why my third act didn't work. It's because of this thing. Or now I understand why my characters didn't work because I didn't arc them this way. And you start kind of building this confidence. So then you go back to that draft and you start rewriting it. You take that confidence, you start rewriting it, but then you hit that same wall and you realize like, oh my gosh, it's still not working. So then you go back and you learn some more stuff, and then you go back and you try again, and you go draft After draft, after draft, after draft, and maybe somewhere along the lines you realize like okay this book isn't working. I have this new idea for a book. I'm going to set this one on the shelf. I'm going to work on this new book. I'm going to get it right this time. So you plan it out. You structure it. You think through the whole plot, all the characters, how they're going to interact. You sit down. You write it. It's not working either. You go learn something else. You come back. You try to write it again, and round and round we go. And before you know it, it's been five years. It's been ten years. It's been fourteen point nine or more years. So what? What is going on here? Why doesn't this work? Because again, this is what we are told to do. Try to write. If it's not working, go learn something, then try it again. Why isn't this working? So imagine you've never ridden a bike before and you decide you want to learn how to ride a bike. And so the first thing you do is you go to Amazon and you find 2 books on how to ride a bike. So you read the whole thing, you take copious notes, you underline, you dog-ear, you put those little tabs in, those colored tabs on the best pages. You take all these notes, you just suck down all the information. And then you go online and you find an online course about how to write a book. So you watch all of the videos, you fill out all the worksheets, you understand everything. You're learning so much. You're learning the physics about bikes, how to corner. You learn how the cogs work, how the gears work. You learn how to fill up the tires to the perfect pressure. You learn how to do a wheelie. You learn all of this stuff. And you're thinking, okay, I think I'm about ready to start riding a bike. But then you hear about a Tour de France winner. He's coming through town. He's a champion bike rider and he's teaching a 3-day class at your local YMCA. So you buy a ticket, you sit through the whole seminar, you take copious notes. During the Q&A, you ask really good questions. Okay, for sure. Now you're ready. You get a bike and you get on. What's the first thing that's going to happen? Like, think about it. What's going to happen? You're going to wobble. You're going to fall. You're going to skin your knee. But you put all this time into learning. You know everything about riding a bike. And yet you get on a bike, you wobble, you fall down, you skin your knee. And you know what makes it even worse? While you're sitting on the ground holding your knee. It's bleeding freely. Some 8-year-old kid flies right past you. Not only is she riding the bike, she doesn't even have her hands on the handlebars. She's just pedaling. And then she grabs her handlebars. She hops the curb. She starts riding around. And you know what? She doesn't know anything about how to ride a bike. She doesn't know the physics. She doesn't know the tire pressure. She doesn't know how to pedal. She doesn't have any of the knowledge that you've built up. And yet she can ride the bike. Huh? What's going on So what you see is knowledge does not translate into skill. Learning about something does not become the ability to do it. So in the writing culture, all of this stuff about reading craft books, learning about character development, learning about plot, learning about all of this stuff, it's never ever going to get you closer to writing something publishable because learning about something is not the same thing as the skill to be able to do it. We see this again over and over and over in any other skill that you've gotten in your life. You didn't get it by just learning a bunch of stuff and then automatically being able to do it. You got it in a completely different way. I guarantee somewhere in your life, whether you know how to play a musical instrument, you're really good at your job, or just learning how to walk, walk, you've gone through this process intuitively, but you've never actually thought through it and tried to apply it to writing. And so this is what we're going to do. We're going to take all of the research around humans learning complex skills, and we're going to look at how we might actually apply it to writing to fix this broken culture about how writers are actually made. So this research goes all the way back to 1993. It started with K. Anders Ericsson and some of his colleagues. They studied world-class violinists, chess grandmasters, athletes, and others. And what they found is the people at the top weren't born there. Again, there is no such thing as natural talent that will make you great. They practiced, but they practiced differently. They did something called deliberate practice. This is what Anders Ericsson named it. He called it deliberate practice. And deliberate practice, when done right, doesn't help you survive a wicked environment. It completely dismantles a wicked environment and rebuilds builds it as a kind one. And there are 5 conditions that go into every kind environment. So again, there are some things like playing the guitar where the kind environment is kind of natural, but with a wicked environment like the writing environment, you have to on purpose dismantle the wicked environment and build it back up as a kind environment. Once you've done that, then building skill becomes very straightforward and very natural, just like other skills. And there's 5 conditions that have to go in place. So let's walk through each of these. And again, this is in all the finding— I'm going to put down all the different links to the research in the notes of this video so you can go read it yourself if you don't believe me. So there's 5 conditions that go into this. Condition number 1 is you have to practice specific skills. So writing is not one skill, it's actually lots of different skills all kind of shoved together under this umbrella of writing. Again, let's go back to playing the guitar. Playing the guitar is not actually one skill, it's lots of different skills. It's finger placement, it's chords, it's learning to play under different tempos and different rhythms. It's learning how to string the guitar, how to tune the guitar, how to strum the guitar, how to pick the guitar. There are actually dozens and dozens of skills that live under this umbrella of playing the guitar. Writing's the same way. It's learning how to write dialogue, learning how to write action, learning how to write exposition, show versus tell, point of view, setting, pacing, narrative drive, grammar, the 5 Commandments of Storytelling. So many things that I've talked about on this channel, all of these individual skills that come together under this writing thing. So if you want to learn writing, you can't learn it by trying to do all of the things at the same time. Again, coming back to playing the guitar, I don't sit down and try to play really complicated music if I'm just learning how to play the guitar. I learn the easiest chord first, the second easiest. I learn like 3 chords and I just try to do those over and over and over until I can do them without thinking. And then I start building from there. So you have to practice specific skills until they become natural and then Then you can start building up from there. This is why just write your novel is like telling a new pianist to learn everything at once by performing a Beethoven song live. You cannot learn to write a great novel by trying to write a great novel. It doesn't make any sense. If you look at the actual research, this is the opposite that you should be doing. The last thing you do is take all the individual skills you've practiced and figured out how to do them together and then try to write novel. This is the thing. It repairs pattern repetition because you're drilling repeatedly these individual skills until you can do them without thinking. Let's just look at show versus tell. Almost every writer I work with does not know how to show and does not know when to show versus when to tell. We have to drill it over and over and over. They have to fail over and over and over until they get just that one skill right, and then we can move on to other skills. This is how it works. Think about how you've learned anything. You started with this simple thing. You kept practicing until you could do it really well, and then you moved on to other things. So that's condition number one. You have to practice specific skills. Condition number two is you have to diagnose against a standard. Remember that anytime you were getting feedback that was unclear or wrong or subjective, it wasn't helping you get better. It was actually making you worse. So let's imagine that you needed to go get an MRI at the hospital, get an MRI scan. So last year I had a knee injury. Injury doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and I had to go in and get an MRI of my knee. So let's imagine I came out of that and the tech looked at my scan and was kind of like, hey, you know, what do you think all of these colors mean? I'm not really sure. I would be running out of that hospital because you don't want somebody that doesn't know the standard diagnosing what's going on. A real diagnosis measures against a defined standard, not how the scan feels to somebody— writing groups, AI, beta readers, your mom or your sister reading your stuff— they have no standard. There is no standard they're judging against other than how they feel internally, which is completely subjective. So first, you have to have a standard of what you're trying to practice against. And this fixes the whole rule stability or feedback accuracy inside of the wicked environment by actually diagnosing against a standard. So number one was you have to break it down into individual skills and Number 2 is diagnose against a standard. And number 3 is you have to have expert analysis. So let's go back to that MRI thing. Let's say the tech came in with the results of my MRI and they told you like, you know what, I'm actually really busy. I'm gonna go over to the patient in the next room. I'm gonna just hand them your scan and I'm gonna have them tell you whether or not you need surgery or not. They're pretty smart. They can figure it out. Again, you would run out of that hospital as fast as possible. And yet constantly writers hand their writing to a group of fellow amateurs and just ask for their opinion. An expert has seen 1,000 versions of your scene. This is the thing. I don't want an MRI tech that needs to ask somebody else. I want the MRI tech that's been through school, that's gotten their degree, that's looked at thousands of scans and been able to judge them against the standard, and they have been correct. That's what you need. You need expert feedback. You need that above all else. You need somebody that can look at your writing and figure out, here's Here's what's right. Here's how to fix what's wrong. And tell you in concrete, specific details. That's what you need, expert analysis. This is how you get past this thing of never knowing if you're doing it right or not. So again, this is what the research says is that the third thing you need is expert analysis. Let's get to the fourth thing because once you are breaking things up into individual skills, once you're diagnosing to a standard, once you have an expert doing it, what is the fourth thing that actually like pulls all this together and makes the biggest difference? A short feedback loop. Feedback loop. Every field study, whether it's musicians, surgeons, chess players, any field that's applied any of this research to it, this is the thing that matters. How close is you practicing and getting the feedback? How close in time? So again, if I'm playing the guitar and I play the wrong note, I immediately know I played it wrong. Or if I'm playing something with a teacher and they see me do something wrong and they immediately stop me and tell me how I need to do it right. That shortening the feedback loop is one of the most important things you can do. And yet, what do we do in writing? The feedback loop is usually months or years. You sit alone writing a 100,000-word manuscript, and then you hand it off to an editor hoping they can address what's wrong. But again, if you go too long between practicing and getting feedback, you've made so many mistakes in there that you You can't hope to fix them all. You can't learn how to get better. The only way you learn how to get better is by practicing a small individual piece, getting feedback, and doing that over and over until you can do it right, and then moving on to the next thing. You have to solve the feedback speed. This is what we see over and over and over. What's the 5th thing? It's a clear roadmap of growth. No guitarist sits down and tries to learn the most complex things at first. They start with the basic chords and then build Same thing with the woodworker. A brand new woodworker who doesn't know how to do anything doesn't try to build a rocking chair. They just try to build a simple box. They start with a small unit, get good at that, and build up from there. And yet, what do we tell writers to do? Sit down and write your novel. Take that epic fantasy trilogy you've had in your head since you were a kid and just sit down and give it a go. And that is the exact same thing as telling a woodworker that's never done anything before to build a rocket ship. Anything to just build a rocking chair or telling somebody that wants to learn how to dance to pick the most complicated choreography and just give it a go. It doesn't make any sense. There has to be a clear roadmap. And inside of writing, it's right there staring at us in the face. Think about how a reader actually takes in a book. They don't experience a novel as a novel. They don't even experience it as a series of like arcs in the story, a series of acts. They don't even experience it one scene at a time. They experience it one sentence at a time. They read a sentence, then the next one, then the next one. And we've all read those books where after a few sentences we realize this book is not very good and we move on. And so if you want to learn how to write a novel, you start at the sentence level. You break it down. And at the sentence level, you've got to learn all the very specific things. What does a good sentence of dialogue look like and how do you write it? What does a good sentence of showing versus telling look like and how do you write it. Same thing with point of view. Same thing with setting description, exposition, all of these things. This is how you learn. It's the 5 conditions that go into it. You have to break down the complex skill into individual skills. You have to practice those individually against an actual standard, have an expert judge whether or not you're hitting the standard, and give you very fast feedback. So you're practicing a few sentences at a time and then getting feedback, and then you're building up the skills in a natural order that you need to learn them. Those are the 5 conditions that show up in the research. And think about this: in the typical way we are told to learn how to write, every one of those items don't exist. The wickedness of writing is because we don't take the research that's sitting there right in front of us since 1993, extract the lessons, and apply them to writing. We taking the word of these writers that wrote this stuff down that doesn't make any sense. And we keep just trying to do it. And this is why of all the creative fields, us as writers are so far behind. And we're telling people, maybe you're just a bad writer and you can't be helped. Or maybe you just need to try it for another 10 years and maybe one day it will click. It is time to move on from this old way of doing things, apply the research and the science that we know works in other fields and apply it to the writing world. So let's go back to 2015 when I started working with Shawn. I was trying to learn how to write and it just wasn't working. And so eventually he said, you know what? You're not allowed to work on novels anymore. You're not even allowed to work on short stories. Even a scene is too long for you. And what he told me is, Tim, I hate to tell you, but you can't even write a sentence. And so that is what we started Working on is just how do you write one great sentence that will get the reader to read the next one and the next one and the next one? And I'll tell you, it bruised my ego. I did not like it. I was mad at him. I thought it was ridiculous. I've been trying to write for over ten years. Who are you to tell me? And yet I thought, well, I do have this world-class editor with like this huge track record in the publishing industry trying to help me. Maybe I should give it a try. And after a few weeks, I started noticing something. My sentences were getting better. And then after a couple months, I noticed. Man, my sentences are getting really strong. And then he let me move on and write a scene. And then I wrote scenes that for the first time actually worked. I could go back and look at my old writing and see where everything is broken. What I couldn't see before, I could see now, and I could start writing stuff that worked. And then fast forward, I wrote my book The Shithead, and it works. It's a great book. People love it. Again, sold thousands of copies, hundreds of reviews, really good feedback, and I can consistently I can consistently write working writing now because I slowed down, applied the research of deliberate practice, and learned the actual skills of writing. Just like if I want to learn to play the guitar, I got to learn the chords. I got to learn how to strum. I got to learn how to tune my guitar. I got to learn all these things. And then I can go off and play something beautiful, something I'm proud of, but I had to slow down and learn the skills. None of this is magic. And that's the point. This is not magic. This is not talent. This is not the muse. Magic is what the writing world has been selling all along. Slog away and hope that the muse blesses you. Hope that you're not one of those bad writers that's hopeless. Instead, let's just look at how humans acquire skill and apply that to writing. And lo and behold, writers actually noticeably get better at the craft to the point that they can write publishable work on a repeated basis. So if you've been working on your writing for 5, 10, 20, 40 years without writing a book that you're proud of, without actually looking at your work and saying, man, I'm going to be proud to publish that, hand it to my friends, getting letters and emails from readers telling you that it's changed their life, maybe whatever you're doing isn't working and you should try something different. You should try looking at the research, taking those 5 conditions and applying it to your writing. And this is what we have built at Story Grid. We spent a decade figuring out how to apply this research to writing, and we've gotten really good at it. So now we know what that roadmap is. We know what the skills are that you need to learn. We've broken them down. For you and put them in order. And we have a standard of when you're doing it right and when you're doing it wrong. And we know how to give you feedback that will help you quickly add these skills and build them up from sentences to scenes, to short stories, to writing a novel that you're proud to publish. So if you're interested in this, of trying something different with your writing that is actually based on the science and research instead of anecdotes and hope and muses and talent and antiquated ideas of how learning works, then it's time to talk to us. Go to storygrid.com/call. You're going to fill out a short application just to tell us a little bit about who you are and then book a time to talk with us. It's completely free. It's not a hard pitch. We just want to hear where you're at with your writing and help you figure out what's next for you. If we can help you, we'll tell you that. If not, we'll tell you that too. So go to storygrid.com/call. But more than anything, what I want you to do is take this magical thinking out of your writing. Please don't keep keep doing what you've been doing for 10 years and hoping that one day it will click, because it won't. You're working in a wicked environment, and that doesn't make you a better writer. Take the magic out, apply the 5 conditions that you see in the research, and then you'll see your skills start building. If you want to take this even further, I've got a video right here on the screen that's the next best thing you should watch. But either way, thanks so much for being a writer. Thanks for being a part of our community here at Story Grid, and I'll see you next time.