Why It’s Hard to Believe You Could Get Good At Writing. It’s a Matter of Training in a Linear Progression. I’ve taken up ultra running.

By that I mean the 100-mile race I’m going to run in three (maybe 5) years.

That is, after I work up to a mile, and then two. Then three.

Actually, I don’t know if I’ll get to that race, but I am running every day and something amazing has happened.

I like it.

I look forward to going out. I walk for 4 minutes and run for 1.

Next, I’m going 3 and 1.

At some point I’ll run more than I walk.

Then I’ll run farther.

What occurs to me is this: It’s like writing a book.

A 100-mile race sounds impossible, but then you realize it’s just running until you get to the end. It’s just training when 1 mile feels difficult, until 1 mile feels easy, then tackling 2.

Doing that until you get to 100. People have done it.

People have written books. It’s just writing some words and putting them all together.

It sounds like a lot, because you’re not in shape for it. But you build muscle, skill, endurance, and, unlike a 100-mile race, you don’t have to do it all at once. In fact, you shouldn’t.

While we’re on physical exercise analogies, it also reminds me of weight lifting. They call a certain kind of training “linear progression.”

What happens is that you train on an exercise with a certain weight for 3 sets of 5 reps.

It’s kind of hard, but you just barely get the weight up.

In a few days you do it again, but you add 5 pounds. You are surprised you can do it, because last time it was difficult.

But now it’s kind of easy, because something happened last time when you lifted the weight that was kind of hard. Your muscles adapted. Now, 5 pounds heavier is sort of easy and you’re surprised.

Next time, you add 5 more pounds. It’s doable, but it feels heavy. You can’t believe in a few days you’re going to add more weight.

But you do, and you can lift it easily again.

This goes on for a while until you are way stronger than you were when you started.

How cool is that?

Writing is like that. Anything is like that, actually.

You see where you want to be, and you can’t imagine it, because you are thinking of going from where you are to jumping thirty steps ahead in progression.

But you only have to jump one step ahead. That step enables the next, then the next, and so on.

So how might you think like an athlete in your quest to improve your writing?

Based on our 2 analogies, running and strength training, you could think of writing endurance (running), and strength (skill).

Endurance Training

One key to successful writing is just writing a lot. I have a career in writing not just because I am good at writing words, but also because I can write a lot in a day. When I started out, I could finish projects faster than most people, and that gave me the momentum to get traction. In this case, I’m not talking about typing fast, but writing long enough each day that I can get a high word count, usually aiming for about 5000 words. Thankfully, that’s across multiple projects and easier than if I had to write 5000 words on one project.

So practice. If you’re not good at getting a lot of output, set a timer for fifteen minutes and don’t stop.

Next time 20, then 21, 22, 23, 24, and so on. If you’re like me, you can get up to about 90 eventually, and then maybe after a proper break, you could do another 90.

I had the good fortune of being incentivized because I was paid by the word for several years. I developed endurance, and it paid off.

Strength/Skill Training

For skill, I can think of nothing better than copy work. Pick three writers you love who are better than you. Take a paragraph from one of them and copy it out.

Try to write out as much as you can from memory.

Once you’ve written the paragraph, do it again.

And again and again until you can write the whole paragraph from memory.

Then write your own paragraph in a similar fashion.

Next time, do the same thing with a second author.

After that, on a different day, do the third author.

Once you’ve done all three, go back and find a new paragraph in the first author and do it again. No question you will get better at writing that way, and you will be surprised to find your own voice in the process.

Just for fun I’ll give you three paragraphs from three authors I like if you want to try it this month. If you have books by Annie Dillard, C.S. Lewis, or William Zinzer, use them. They’re perfect. But for here, I wanted to only use stuff from the public domain so I don’t violate any copyright laws. These came from Project Gutenberg.

G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy

The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. It is a small matter, but not irrelevant, that this striking mistake is commonly supported by a striking saying. We continually hear of the courage of convictions. I should speak rather of the courage of convictions. I should speak rather of the courage of convictions, for a conviction is often a thing from which a man has to be rescued. A conviction may be the narrowest prison in which a man can live.

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason. His mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a mean infinity, a base and slavish eternity. It is possible to be released from the tyranny of the whole world and imprisoned in the tyranny of one idea.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book, a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing.”

The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface, but to the pilot that was an italicized passage. Indeed, it was more than that. It was a legend of the largest capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation points at the end of it, for it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated.”

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!”

Enjoy, and if you try this let me know how it went and if you believe it helped you improve.

Jeff B. Miller

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