If you can understand the discipline, then, is it possible to make incremental progress every single week? Could you tighten your fundamentals, study related disciplines for synergy and crossover, and experiment on the hardest problems every single week?
Why not?
Really, why not?
Almost everyone sucks at almost everything when they first try it. But do they keep trying, and do they make focused effort at improvement?
If you wanted to be a writer, you could study some fundamental of writing every single week. You could study some related or unrelated field to see if there’s some possible synergistic effects. And you could take a crack at doing something difficult in writing every single week.
For instance, you could re-read a part of Elements of Style or On Writing every week. Then you could go through and edit and re-write a piece that’s already written to try to make it better using the newly learned rules you’re adapting.
Then you could kind of scan around in related or unrelated fields.
So what field does he suggest one might want to take ideas from? He explains it in this remarkably troper-worthy segment:
Personally, I was thinking of doing a sort of “DNA analysis” of successful writing. Have you heard of the Music Genome Project? It powers Pandora.com.
So I was thinking, you could probably do something like that for writing, and then try to craft a written work with elements known to appeal to people. For instance, if you wished to write a best selling detective novel, you might do an analysis of when the antagonist(s) appear in the plot for the first time. You might find that 15% of bestsellers open with the primary antagonist committing their crime, 10% have the antagonist mixed in quickly into the plot, and 75% keep the primary antagonist a vague and shadowy figure until shortly before the climax.
I don’t know if the pattern fits that – I don’t read many detective novels – but it would be a bit of a surprise if it did. You might think, well, hey, I better either introduce the antagonist right away having them commit their crime, or keep him shadowy for a while.
Or, to use an easier example – perhaps you could wholesale adopt the use of engineering checklists into your chosen discipline? It seems to me like lots of fields don’t use checklists that could benefit tremendously from them. I run this through my mind again and again – what kind of checklist could be built here? I first came across the concept of checklists being adopted in surgery from engineering, and then having surgical accidents and mistakes go way down.
So what's this Genome Project then? Check it out here. Since that's incidental, I've left it for another thread. This thread would focus on this approach to "eventually coming up with something genius-level":
Learn or re-learn skills and concepts that will help you improve your writing, regularly*
for example, re-read a part of Elements of Style or On Writing every week
.
Apply that (re)new(ed) knowledge to the stuff you've already written.[[hottip:**for example, edit and re-write a piece that’s already written to try to make it better]]
Research stuff that might help you.
Release something every now and then. Doesn't need to be something big. Just make sure some work goes out in the open and meets an audience.
Do it again.
According to this guy, eventually, if you're patient and diligent and industrious and methodical, you will come up with something solid. Also, he suggests we use engineering checklists, which apparently have effected a dramatic improvement on unrelated fields such as medicine (surgery in particular):
A checklist is a type of informational job aid used to reduce failure by compensating for potential limits of human memory and attention. It helps to ensure consistency and completeness in carrying out a task. A basic example is the "to do list." A more advanced checklist would be a schedule, which lays out tasks to be done according to time of day or other factors.
So, what do you guys say about taking a methodical approach to writing, and importing tools from other disciplines? Have any of you tried doing something similar?
edited 26th Jun '12 2:16:29 AM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
This writer and businessman explains why is is very skeptical of the idea that only geniuses can come up with genius-level work
("Greatness is something you do, not something you are"
, suggests methodical approaches to help anyone at least contribute something worthwhile to the pool of whatever their chosen field is (this ties in very nicely with that one thread
I created a while ago), uses literature as an illustrative example:
Why not?
Really, why not?
Almost everyone sucks at almost everything when they first try it. But do they keep trying, and do they make focused effort at improvement?
If you wanted to be a writer, you could study some fundamental of writing every single week. You could study some related or unrelated field to see if there’s some possible synergistic effects. And you could take a crack at doing something difficult in writing every single week.
For instance, you could re-read a part of Elements of Style or On Writing every week. Then you could go through and edit and re-write a piece that’s already written to try to make it better using the newly learned rules you’re adapting.
Then you could kind of scan around in related or unrelated fields.
So what field does he suggest one might want to take ideas from? He explains it in this remarkably troper-worthy segment:
So I was thinking, you could probably do something like that for writing, and then try to craft a written work with elements known to appeal to people. For instance, if you wished to write a best selling detective novel, you might do an analysis of when the antagonist(s) appear in the plot for the first time. You might find that 15% of bestsellers open with the primary antagonist committing their crime, 10% have the antagonist mixed in quickly into the plot, and 75% keep the primary antagonist a vague and shadowy figure until shortly before the climax.
I don’t know if the pattern fits that – I don’t read many detective novels – but it would be a bit of a surprise if it did. You might think, well, hey, I better either introduce the antagonist right away having them commit their crime, or keep him shadowy for a while.
Or, to use an easier example – perhaps you could wholesale adopt the use of engineering checklists into your chosen discipline? It seems to me like lots of fields don’t use checklists that could benefit tremendously from them. I run this through my mind again and again – what kind of checklist could be built here? I first came across the concept of checklists being adopted in surgery from engineering, and then having surgical accidents and mistakes go way down.
So what's this Genome Project then? Check it out here
. Since that's incidental, I've left it for another thread. This thread would focus on this approach to "eventually coming up with something genius-level":
According to this guy, eventually, if you're patient and diligent and industrious and methodical, you will come up with something solid. Also, he suggests we use engineering checklists, which apparently have effected a dramatic improvement on unrelated fields such as medicine
(surgery in particular):
From The Other Wiki
Sure sounds useful. Here are listed some of the applications
. Here are some examples, and a web site that helps you create new, neat-looking ones
.
So, what do you guys say about taking a methodical approach to writing, and importing tools from other disciplines? Have any of you tried doing something similar?
edited 26th Jun '12 2:16:29 AM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.