The Deep Practice Walk

Transcript of Helen Sword’s podcast episode The Deep Practice Walk

Hi, I'm Helen Sword from helensword. com, and this is Swordswings, my podcast series for writers in motion. Whether you're out walking or writing in a car or on a train or bus, or just pottering around in your kitchen, this recording will help you move yourself and your writing to someplace new. Today's Swordswing has been excerpted from a conversation that I had back in 2022 with the wonderful professor of health and kinesiology and exceptional writer, Patricia Goodson.

Pat teaches at Texas A&M University and has written two excellent books on academic writing. The first one's called Becoming an Academic Writer, 50 Exercises for Paced, Productive, and Powerful Writing. And the second is 90 Days, 90 Ways, Inspiration, Tips, and Strategies for Academic Writers. Both of these lively research-based books really live up to their titles. You can find links to them from my bookshop at helensword.com. Enjoy this snippet in which we discuss daily writing habits, the connection between writing and sleep, and the importance of feeding your unconscious mind with little bits of writerly food that is useful information, even if only for five minutes a day. What does productivity mean for each of us, really? Join us as we explore this question.

…..

Helen: So Tara Gray's work, I love her book. I've recommended it to many people, but I've also written a critique of some of it, which was really the write every day mantra. You know, I've published an article called “Write every day, a mantra dismantled”. Tara was one of the big proponents of that, and Paul Sylvia, who wrote “How to write a lot” is another one. They both quote Robert Boyce and his research on writing every day. And I went back and looked at the original research and found that some of the ways in which it was conducted and the results were kind of questionable, but nobody had questioned them for 20 years. People were just citing them because it sounds so great. “If you write every day, you will double your productivity”. Fantastic! You know, and then people were just quoting that, quoting that, quoting that and never going back to look at it. So my article wasn't so much about Boyce, you know, Boyce was an absolute pioneer in the field of writing development and I hugely admire him. So it wasn't trying to take down the great man, but it was a bit of a critique of those who just took everything and said, yep! And then it was the people who followed that write everyday advice and it worked for them who then were writing about the book saying, this is it, this is the magic, you have to do it.

And, you know, I drank the Kool Aid too for a while and then I started running workshops where I was like, you know, you have to get up at six in the morning and write every day. And people just couldn't do it. And then they would, some people would, but there would be a whole bunch who would try it and it didn't fit their lives or didn't fit their way of working or whatever. And I had to really rethink my whole perspective. And it was when I started doing the research from my book Air and Light and Time and Space, on how successful academics write, that I found few of the successful academic writers I interviewed actually followed these sort of principles. They found other ways to get their writing done, but it was not waking up at 6:00 AM and writing for most of them, just for a few. So I wrote this article that was basically trying to say, “great, if it works for you, by all means do it. But if it doesn't work for you, don't beat yourself up about it. There are other things.”

So what I'm getting to is you started very much with, you know, “here's the Tara Gray Bible, follow those principles.” You start trying them. You start telling other people about them. All of that sounds very familiar. What you ended up with was a book of. Strategies you could try rather than things you must do. So you shifted somewhere along the way, I feel like from the formula to the smorgasbord.

Patricia: I don't know if I shifted, but I started…and I'll talk about that, I'm revising my book, my ‘50 exercises’ book, becoming an academic, I'm revising it for the third edition right now. And I'll talk a little bit about how my thinking about academic writing changed, and it changed because of the research I was doing also. So I started learning a lot more and doing some research related to complex adaptive systems. And I started particularly recommending just one strategy. So, for instance, If I go in and tell somebody I'm looking for strategies to improve my productivity and I tell them, “okay, write at least 15, 30 minutes every day,” it may work for them, but usually it doesn't. And then they come back to me and say, “okay, I tried that, but it didn't work. Can you give me another step?” And then I'll give another strategy, whatever it is, find support, get regular feedback, whatever it might be. And they go and they try it out and they come back and they say, “no, that doesn't work for me.”

And so I started seeing that happen, but I also started seeing a lot of the people who went through my classes and my workshops and studios and stuff really getting enthusiastic and saying, “Oh, this works!”. And “this is amazing. All of these strategies”. And I started observing what was going on. What I learned, coupled with what I was learning about complex systems, was that strategies and isolation don't work. What really tends to work best is when you develop a system. Here’s what I mean by system: the simplest definition of a system is a set of elements that interact. You can get more complex definitions, but that's the simplest way to understand it.

So I started noticing that, and proposing now, this is how I talk about academic writing. Because it is such a complex task, you can't tackle it with just one strategy here, one strategy there, and especially if you adopt one strategy and it doesn't work, you drop it, and you adopt another one, and it doesn't work, and then you drop it. Because we get discouraged, because it's not doing anything for us.

But I learned that what really happened is…it's not a magic trick or anything like that, and it doesn't work for everybody either, but the idea is to have a system of elements. So if you do write every day, for at least 30 minutes a day, let's say you want to adopt that strategy. You also need to have other strategies that support that one. So for instance, having a writing partner or accountability partner that keeps you going while you're doing those 10-15 minutes a day, having a mindset that says, “don't underestimate ridiculously small investments of time and energy.” That's the principle behind a little book called The Kaizen Way. So the idea that we tend to underestimate what five minutes of writing sometimes can do, or if we have five minutes and we haven't been able to touch our writing, just opening a file and maybe rereading a sentence and saying, “Oh, I can take this word out of this sentence” and then closing that file. That's all the writing you did for that day. Somehow something happens there. And so my thinking about writing has shifted twice. I still will encourage people to write every day if they can, because there's science behind that. And so my kinesia—I used to be in a department called Department of Health and Kinesiology, and kinesiology is the study of movement—and so it’s related to exercise physiology, studying exercise and movements, muscles, cells, et cetera. In that literature, apparently, I haven't read it thoroughly, but my colleagues have told me this over and over: there's something about when you're learning a new task with your mind and your body, there's something about practicing that task or performing that task in intervals in regular intervals, let's say 24 hours. Okay, just as an example, every 24 hours doing that task, let's say writing and sleeping, having built-in sleep in the middle of those 24 hours. So let's say you're learning to play golf, right? And you go and you do your golf practice for 15 minutes that day, whatever, probably more because it's hard to yeah. But anyway, you practice and then next day you practice around the same time. So, the interval is about 24 hours with sleep in the middle. There's something that happens to your brain, the firing of your neurons in your brain that really, really helps establish that not only as a habit, but also the learning that goes with that.

You will not see me just say “just write 30 minutes every day or whatever, 15 minutes a day, and that's it. You will improve your productivity and the quality of your writing.” I wouldn't say that because it's like if you come to me and ask me for a recipe for an apple pie, and I say, “go buy some apples.” And that's it. And you go and buy apples. You know, you have to get the ingredients, but then they have to go together. So we're embedded in very complex systems. We are a complex system ourselves. I think it started to make sense to me that good writing is something that emerges out of an interaction of elements.

What are the elements that I tend to propose in a very simplified way? A set of strategies, not just one strategy, not just write every day, but write every day, get frequent feedback, do the deep practice, log your time, keep a record of what you're doing, and leave notes for yourself for the next writing session. A bunch of those strategies there. So a set of strategies is one element of that system. Another element of the system is a set of tools. So you need to know what's out there that can make your life easier. For goodness sakes, go get ProWritingAid, Grammarly.com. Let a machine help you by showing patterns of problems in your writing, things that you need to fix related to grammar, style, consistency, whatever it might be. So 1) a set of strategies, 2) a set of tools, and then 3) a set or subsets of support. Various types of support are incredibly important to have because writing is a very lonely task. And if you're writing difficult things like you're trying to get a degree or you're writing incredibly complex books or incredibly complex reports, you're really doing yourself a disservice if you do it in complete isolation all by yourself.

So you need several types of support and I talk about social support, emotional support and instrumental support. What I mean by instrumental support is feedback. Feedback is absolutely essential. When we talk about deep practice, you're going to see that feedback is really important, too. So, the idea is that if you do one strategy, or you just write every day 30 minutes a day, but you don't have any other strategies to support that one, or you don't have the appropriate tools, and you don't have the appropriate support, you might flounder.

Some people get lucky, or they're, you know, already very disciplined, or maybe they already have other elements of the system in place, and they don't realize it, and they, they flourish with that. But for a lot of people, it doesn't work at all. So that's the way my thinking about writing has shifted.

And the more I learn about complex systems—well, the more complex the task that you have to tackle, the more complex is going to be the system that you should bring to it. Now, when you have a system, and you have all of these things to rely on, strategies, tools, and support, you can adapt the strategies. And I think that's what I tried to do with my writing book with the 50 exercises was to propose “Here's an exercise. Try this, but always leave it open to adapt this to you.” So if you are like, “Oh, I think I could write every day a little bit because I think I see value in that, but I don't want to get up at 3 o'clock”, —which was what I used to do, you know, I was like, “no, that can't be done at all”—Well, okay, find the time where you have the most energy and especially creative energy. Because usually at the end of the day, even if you're a night owl, sometimes you get decision fatigue. And that might not be the time you have the most creative energy, but find that time in the day and build that in. And try to maintain a rhythm, a regularity to your writing.

There's something about feeding your mind with elements from your writing project even if you're not writing for extensive periods of time. Just feeding your mind, your subconscious will go to work for you on that piece of information that you fed. I joke with my students when I do studios, Helen, I say, “you have a graduate, the cheapest graduate assistant you'll ever have working for you 24-7. And that graduate assistant is your mind, especially your subconscious.”
And all it requires, that's why it's cheap, all it requires is some food. And it's not of the calorie kind. It's food in terms of information. So sometimes, like I said, just opening your file, reading a sentence, and figuring out, “oh, I can make this sentence crisper, sharper, move to the point quicker. If I take this word, and I move this word around”—and that's all you did, and it took you 5 minutes or 10 minutes, that was your writing session. That's food for your graduate assistant! Your graduate assistant has been fed. And believe it or not, when you come back to that project, let's say tomorrow or two days later, you come back to it as a different person. Basically, you're thinking differently; your subconscious will be will have worked on that.

Helen: Also, there's a beautiful mechanism in regularly feeding your mind with your writing. So many times I don't want to write every day. Well, I'll try to just get in touch with my writing, touch base with my writing. Sophie Nichols, who's going to be my next special event guest on writing and wellbeing, talks about keeping your writing warm every day. Just touch your writing every day. I've been taking all kinds of notes as you've been talking because it's also relevant to my productivity catalyst. I want to give people that sort of feedback, that flexible way of thinking, moving forward, but also take advantage of the fact that you've got this group of people together for eight weeks, where you actually can say things like, “okay, just for these eight weeks, or six weeks, or three weeks, I want you to write every day. You can stop after that, but let's try it!"
And of course, in my book Air and Light and Time and Space, I interviewed all these people about when they actually write. And I found that you get the morning writers, you get the four to 6 PM writers—which is a time for most people that's a disaster! But people say, “Oh, I can't really write until I'm done with my teaching. And then I relax into my writing.”— Middle of the night writers too. I interviewed several of them. You know, so finding your own rhythms was really the key to it. And it wasn't necessarily the everydayness either. It was more the desire to find that time. I just drew my this diagram, what the whole productivity catalyst is going to be based on: my base model. And so where you have the kinesiology metaphor and this idea of movement, I have this sort of architectural metaphor of this base that we build, which is the behavioral, Artisanal (the craft elements), the social elements, and the emotional elements of the pleasure. And it's not identical, but it sort of hits all the same points as the things you're talking about Pat, the strategies, tools and support, social, emotional, instrumental. I think that's the craft element, the kind of artisanal element, and all of those are supporting what I call the behavioral, you know, the getting the stuff done.

So, it’s these complex ways of thinking, and then finding metaphors as well that will help people integrate them. Because there are people like me, when you talk about complex systems, I just go, “that sounds too hard.” Whereas other people I know who do like systems theory, they're like, “Oh yeah, complex systems"! Whereas for me, you know, bring me metaphors. I've just been writing my newsletter post for the week and it's all about gardens. How do I write about Twitter? I end up with a tree and birds and gardens.

Patricia: But those are very complex systems. So a garden is a very complex system where several elements are continually interacting. And the beauty of complex systems is that in that interaction of the elements, things change over time. So time is a very important element of complex systems. Complex dynamic systems. Time is essential and you are going to change as a writer, as you adopt new strategies and you change your mindset perhaps about writing or adopt new tools.

Tools come and go, right? We used to use Word Perfect, and now we don't use it anymore type of thing… So, all of that is going to, over time, change you, transform you, as a writer. And that's a beautiful thing, and we need to take it into account. So, certain strategies that worked for me, five years ago, may not be working for me right now, and they may not may work for me five years from now if I pick them up again. And so we need to have that flexibility, that malleability, with what we're doing. And, absolutely, I like the complex systems metaphor just because I'm in it. See, that's the research that I've been doing and understanding science from that perspective and that theory a little bit more.

Helen: But you can use anything you can think of, like our bodies or our minds. The most complex system out there is probably our brains. Right? Absolutely. So, I just moved straight to the metaphors and the stories that integrate the complex systems into something maybe more sort of visual and poetic. Whereas the scientists I know will be drawing their diagrams, and some people, of course, crossover those, you know, those stereotypes don't always hold.

Well, I want to get into deep practice, but first, very quickly, tell us about the newer book, 90 days, 90 ways.

Patricia: The 90 days, 90 ways was basically designed to… Well, I actually read a book—I don't have it here—but it was a book for creative writers, fiction writers. I think it was called The Writer's Companion, if I'm not mistaken. A tiny book that had one entry per day. So one page per day for a whole year, on just ideas about writing, interviews or information from famous writers, books about writing. And I thought “this is really interesting!” I enjoy it because when I start my writing session, I like to have a little bit of a warm up. So I do something pleasurable for about 5 or 10 minutes. And many times that pleasurable thing for me is reading about writing. And so I'll get a book. And I'll read just a couple of pages and that gets me motivated to start my writing session. I don't jump directly to the boring stuff, the stuff that I have to do. I warm up a little bit.

Helen: So one thing in the virtual writing studio that I run in the WriteSPACE, I do five or 10 minutes of something reflective or creative followed by a writing sprint.

Patricia: Pleasurable, right? Start with something that makes you want to be there. And so I started writing, I started reading this little book, The Daily Writer, Writer's Companion, something like that, one page a day. And I thought, “this is amazing. I wonder if there's anything like that for academic writers.” Because all of the people that were mentioned in there in the books were for fiction writers. And I thought, “I wonder if there's anything for academic writers.” And lo and behold, there wasn't anything for academic writers along those lines.

And so I started writing this book! I was going to do 365 entries but I got bogged down by life, stuff happened, I lost steam. But I thought, “Hmm can I invite a couple of people to help me finish it up?” I invited Malika and Mina to help me out. We had enough entries for 90 days, so 13 weeks, and basically it's designed or formatted as one page a day.

Here’s the print version. Let me get a page that has a cartoon so you get an idea. Every page has a day of the week on top. So this is a page for Sunday week five, and every day of the week has a category. I won't remember all the categories, but for instance, Sunday is a writing prompt. So I give you a little prompt and say, okay, Sunday week. Pick this up and continue the writing or write something related to that. Wednesdays is the humor day; You don't have to do anything, just read and laugh. But sometimes there are suggestions there like ‘write yourself a rejection letter.’ So if you're going to submit an article or a book proposal, and the odds are tiny that you'll get accepted and you're discouraged, write yourself a rejection letter right then and there, get a good laugh, get it out of your system and move on. So every day of the week has a category. I think Mondays may be books about writing, academic writers mostly that I have here.

And so that's how the book is designed. And meant to be read one page a day. And oftentimes it'll tell you to go do something or try something or think about something and think about yourself in a different way in terms of your writing. And some entries are just informational. Just read it and that's it. That's your reading for the day. Interestingly enough, I have several of my students say, “Oh, I love your book, Dr. Goodson, but I had to sit down and read it all in one! One time, one pass, because I couldn't stop reading” and I'm going, “Oh, this is like taking a bottle of vitamins all at once. Don't do that!” (Laughs).

…..

That's the end of today's Sword Swing. I hope that both your body and your mind have moved to someplace new since we started. The rest of my conversation with Pat focused on the concept of deep and deliberate practice, and how to apply this interesting concept to writing. You can watch and listen to the full two-hour special event in the videos section of the WriteSPACE library. That's my online members-only resource site at helensword.com/writespace, where you can also find my full series of Swordswing podcasts and transcripts, if you're a member.

Thanks for listening, and I look forward to walking with you again very soon.