Deliberate Practice (Or, Why Just Writing More Isn’t Enough)

There’s a comforting belief that if we simply keep showing up, we’ll inevitably get better.

We just need to write another book, paint another canvas, play another scale, run another mile.

Surely repetition is the key to continuous improvement.

I used to think that too.

Comfort isn’t the same as improvement

After all, experience counts for something. The more books we write, the more comfortable we become with the mechanics of storytelling. Characters arrive more easily. Dialogue flows more naturally. We make fewer beginner mistakes.

But comfort and improvement are not the same thing.

Over the past year, while revising my upcoming novel, The Wooden Ring, I found myself spending hours on problems that had very little to do with writing more words.

Instead, I was asking questions like:

How should the reader experience this moment?

Should this revelation arrive in a letter? A whispered rumour? A magical vision? A frightened refugee staggering into port?

The information itself wasn’t changing, but the emotional experience was. In the first version, the information arrived cleanly and efficiently. It did its job. But it left no bruise. When I changed the delivery, the same fact carried fear, uncertainty, and consequence. The scene no longer merely explained what had happened; it made the danger arrive in the room.

And it wasn’t due to repetition. It was deliberate practice.

The difference is deliberate practice

The distinction is close to what psychologist Anders Ericsson spent years studying. He challenged the popular idea that experts succeed simply because they possess extraordinary talent.

His research suggested something far more encouraging: expert performance is built through long periods of focused, intentional improvement. Not simply doing something repeatedly, but continually identifying weaknesses, experimenting with better approaches, receiving feedback, and using what you have learned.

In other words, not just practice.

Deliberate practice.

One of my favourite examples comes from Benjamin Franklin.

As a young man, Franklin wanted to become a better writer. Rather than simply writing more essays and hoping for improvement, he took articles from The Spectator, reduced them to notes, set them aside for several days, then attempted to recreate the originals in his own words. Afterwards he compared his versions with the published pieces to discover precisely where he fell short.

He wasn’t merely accumulating pages. He was studying the craft itself.

What deliberate practice looks like

For me it has meant:

· revising one scene in The Wooden Ring for dread rather than polishing sentences

· studying how another author handles fight scenes

· asking beta readers if anything confused them, unsettled them, or left them hanging

· rewriting a passage from a different character’s point of view or emotional angle

· diagnosing why a chapter drags rather than simply cutting words

It is entirely possible to repeat the same habits for years without improving very much. We become faster. More efficient. More comfortable.

But we don’t necessarily become better. This isn’t to say that repetition doesn’t matter. It does. No one improves at writing without writing. But repetition gives us material; reflection turns it into growth.

The uncomfortable question

Real improvement usually begins with an uncomfortable question:

What am I not seeing?

Sometimes we discover the answer ourselves, sometimes a good editor points it out. Sometimes a coach, teacher, or trusted reader notices what we’ve been blind to all along.

I have been lucky enough to experience all three.

My trainer quietly adjusts my posture before I injure myself. My copy editor notices the words my eyes skim straight past. Readers tell me where they became confused, delighted, or unexpectedly moved.

Each observation becomes an opportunity to improve—not because criticism is pleasant, but because it reveals the next thing to practise.

And that’s another lesson I’ve slowly come to appreciate.

The difficult part is that deliberate practice often interrupts the pleasure of feeling competent. It asks us to return to the awkward beginner’s room again and again, only in smaller and more specific ways.

Curiosity, not self-criticism

But deliberate practice isn’t about becoming relentlessly self-critical. It’s about becoming curious.

Instead of asking: Was I good enough?

I find myself asking: What’s the next skill worth improving?

That question feels lighter. More hopeful. More sustainable.

Looking back over the past year, I can now see the difference between simply accumulating mileage and genuinely improving.

Perhaps that’s why deliberate practice feels so encouraging.

It suggests that improvement isn’t mysterious. It isn’t reserved for prodigies, nor is it a lightning strike.

So the question I keep returning to is not, ‘Am I working hard enough?’ but ‘Am I paying attention to the right thing?’ Improvement is the quiet decision to notice what isn’t working, try something different, and repeat that process often enough that one day your work surprises you.

Not because you wrote more. Because you learned better.