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.
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