A Quick Note on Character's Internal Dialogue in Fiction Writing for the Novice Writer
by Ryker J. Phoenix
CraftWhy Quality is Not About Talent
Last month in this column, we talked about the importance of Quality in the Success Equation.
If you want to be a successful novelist, your writing must have high Quality. And my definition of Quality is “how well you delight your Target Audience.”
So how do you create a novel of high Quality?
You might think that great novelists are born, not made. That you need native writing talent, and lots of it. That you either have it or you don’t.
But none of those is true.
Writing skill is mostly learned, not inherited. Just like all other skills.
Let me commend to you a book that revolutionized my thinking a couple of years ago when I first read it.
The book is titled Talent is Overrated.
I’ll admit that when I first saw this book title, it raised my hackles. I read the first chapter of the book just to convince myself that the author had no idea what he was talking about.
Why was I so offended by the title?
Because we all like to think we have inborn talent that makes us special.
And it’s true that different people are born with somewhat different levels of inborn talent. The gifts God gave us. Or the gifts our genes gave us. Or the gifts the uncaring universe thrust on us by chance. Or whatever you think is the source for “inborn talent.”
But it’s just a fact that inborn talent is vastly overrated. Decades of research have shown that most of what we thought was inborn talent is actually learned.
Want proof?
The Amazing Case of the Polgar Girls
In the 1960s, a Hungarian educator named Laszlo Polgar went looking for a woman to marry who would do an experiment with him. He wanted to raise several children who would all be world experts in some chosen field. Any field. He wasn’t sure which.
Incredibly, he found a woman named Klara who agreed to marry him and join in this experiment. In due course, they had three daughters—Susan, Sophia, and Judit.
When Susan reached the age of four, they settled on chess as the field they would pursue. Laszlo was only a mediocre player, and Klara knew even less, but they began teaching Susan the game intensively.
Intensively. They homeschooled the girls and spent all their available time training them in chess, using the methods Laszlo had developed as an educator.
The short version of this story is that the oldest daughter, Susan, became a grandmaster at the age of 21. She ultimately became the second-best woman chess player in the world. (Why only the second-best? Keep reading.)
The middle daughter, Sophia, did almost as well, reaching the rank of sixth-best woman in the world.
And the youngest daughter Judit? She is the youngest person ever to become a grandmaster (at age 15, several months younger than Bobby Fischer did it). She became the top-ranked woman in the world, ahead of her older sisters. And she was ranked for years among the top ten grandmasters in the world, the rest of whom were men. (If you’ve seen the recent Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit, you know how sexist the chess world was when these amazing young women were growing up.)
The Polgar girls became chess prodigies by the same path that all chess prodigies got that way—using something called “deliberate practice.”
Which is covered very extensively in the book Talent is Overrated.
What About Tiger Woods?
You might be thinking that chess is one thing, but what about golf? Don’t you need amazing physical talent to excel at golf? What about Tiger Woods?
In the book Talent is Overrated, the author makes a strong case for what he believes made Tiger a superstar. And it wasn’t inborn talent. It was deliberate practice.
What About Mozart?
Surely Mozart must be different? Anyone who’s seen the movie Amadeus will be certain that Mozart was nothing but natural, raw, incredible, extraordinary inborn talent.
Nope. Mozart wasn’t born a musical genius. His father drilled him in music from a very early age. Mozart apparently became Mozart through deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice is the secret sauce of every superstar’s superpower.
What is Deliberate Practice?
And what is deliberate practice, exactly?
If you’re worried that it’s just “hard work,” then stop worrying.
When we hear the words “hard work,” we normally think of long, boring hours of awful, joyless drudgery.
Deliberate practice is not that.
Deliberate practice is much harder.
The good news is that deliberate practice is NOT boring. The bad news is that deliberate practice is still not fun. It works because it constantly challenges you to do just a bit more than you’re capable of doing.
That’s why it’s not boring—you’re constantly stretching yourself. And it’s also why it’s not fun—stretching yourself is not comfortable.
I’ll try to summarize deliberate practice in just a few words below. But I won’t succeed. Because it would take a book to really do it justice, and you already know the title of that book: Talent is Overrated.
Here’s a very rough summary:
Part of deliberate practice involves practice, obviously. But superstars practice differently than the rest of us. Superstars analyze what’s working and what’s not working. They break it down into parts. They practice the hard parts obsessively. They may have a coach help them on the hard parts. And they constantly try to do a bit better than their best.
That’s the best I can do in a few words. But I highly recommend you read the book. It’ll change how you think about talent. I’ve got links to all the major retailers on my website here.
Also see:
- Using Internal Dialogue To Reveal Character
- How to Write Internal Dialogue: Dialogue Formatting Guidelines
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