This week’s Scream Writing is going to be a little bit different. If you follow me on Twitter, then you know that I’m a big fan not just of horror movies and screenwriting but also of neuroscience and cognitive psychology. While these subjects may seem far apart, there is a lot we can learn from neuroscience about how we approach our craft and how to get the most out of practicing Scream Writing.
When it comes to practicing we tend to think that the more we do something, the better we get. This is true…but only to a certain extent. Let’s say you gotta see a doctor, would you rather see a doctor that’s been working for five years, or for twenty? Clearly twenty, he has fifteen more years of practice and therefore has to be better, right?
Wrong.
Purposeful Practice
Traditional practice only sees improvements up to a certain extent, an “acceptable” or “good enough” level. Between our two doctors, you would actually be better off going with the younger doctor because he is closer to his learning and the experience gained from learning diminishes in time. The problem with traditional practice is that it serves to get only to that “good enough,” and once you hit that level you are no longer getting outside of your comfort zone and challenging yourself to learn and improve with purposeful practice.
In “Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise,” (which is such a powerful book that even mentioned it on our services page) Anders Ericsson uses the example of a tennis player. They practice, get to the point that they can play a game, but a certain kind of shot continues to slip them up. They never get better at dealing with this kind of shot because they never know when it is coming and it only happens every so often. Regular practice, playing matches with their friends, has gotten the tennis player to this “good enough” stage. Purposeful practice could get them passed it, they could hire a coach to train on that skill, they could work on identifying the signs that announce that kind of shot is coming, etc. What purposeful practice would be doing here is to take the tennis player outside of their comfort zone.
What about us Scream Writers? Do you have a weakness? Maybe it’s dialogue or plotting. Maybe you keep describing action with superfluous crutches like “They head to the door” or “She starts to screams.” Maybe you aren’t so good at writing romantic elements into your stories. Just writing alone will not bring you to master these, traditional practice settles for “good enough” and as Scream Writers, we want to be great.
The Changing Structure of the Brain
But purposeful practice is tiring. It’s exhausting to continue focusing on the parts we aren’t good at and sometimes it feels as if we’ll never be able to figure out how to improve. Of course, we know that improvement is possible, how else do good writers become great? The effects of purposeful practice aren’t just improved character arcs and realistic dialogue, the effects of purposeful practice have an effect on the structure of our brains. To explore this, let’s check out a video about Dan Harmon and explore the brains of London cab drivers.
That’s one of my favorite videos on writing. If you didn’t watch it, it argues that “eventually storytelling will come naturally,” after laying out how Harmon innately knows when and how to inject compelling character development into an improv RPG. But why should storytelling come naturally? For that, we’ll have to take a trip to London.
Neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire was drawn to study the brains of London cab drivers due to the colossal volume of navigational information they are required to know in order to become licensed. Transport London describes the information they are required to know: “all the streets; housing estates; parks and open spaces; government offices and departments; financial and commercial centres; diplomatic premises; town halls; registry offices; hospitals; places of worship; sports stadiums and leisure centres; airline offices; stations; hotels; clubs; theatres; cinemas; museums; art galleries; schools; colleges and universities; police stations and headquarters buildings; civil, criminal and coroner’s courts; prisons; and places of interest to tourists.” That’s more than 25,000 streets and all of the buildings that populate them.
Maguire did a series of studies on the brains of the cabbies. She first found out that the hippocampus is larger in the cabbies than it was in the members of the control group. The hippocampus is involved in the development of memories, particularly memories relating to spatial navigation and remembering the locations of things (such as the thousands upon thousands of buildings the cabbies need to remember). As interesting as these findings were, they don’t tell the Scream Writer anything of interest. Perhaps people with larger hippocampus’ are drawn to being cabdrivers. It’s Maguire’s next study that matters to the Scream Writer and explains Dan Harmon’s “natural” storytelling.
Maguire gathered two groups of people: those training to become London cab drivers, and a control group of regular people. The hippocampus of the two groups were roughly the same size when first studied. Four years later, Maguire again examined the size. This time, she had three groups: certified cabbies, a group of people that dropped out training, and the control group. What she found was that the control group and the group that dropped out were the same as when they were first measured. But those that had made it showed a significantly larger hippocampus than they originally had. Their brains had changed and grown to accommodate what its owners forced it to focus on.
The video about Dan Harmon’s “natural” storytelling ability is a demonstration of this in action in Scream Writers. Harmon has spent years upon years writing and developing stories, many of those years within the studio system of network television where feedback is a constant. Through his work, Harmon has been taking part in purposeful practice (of a form). This practice changes the brain. It’s not just that we learn to write a little better, or a little easier, it’s that our brains adapt to better think about and create stories.
We aren’t just learning how to write, we’re improving our ability to write and to learn about writing.
Purposeful Practice for Scream Writers
Let’s finish off with the most important takeaway. We saw that our abilities degrade over time, when we talked about the doctors. This decay is something that we have to fight against and it is the reason we have to practice purposefully. Working out our minds and creative abilities is a lot like working out our bodies. If we don’t push ourselves, we never overcome homeostasis. If we stay within our comfort zone, we never grow our skills in a meaningful way. If you work out, you have to push yourself in order to see results. When we work out, we push ourselves so that our level of homeostasis is further along than it was before our workout. As Scream Writers, we have to push ourselves as well.
Anders Ericsson describes several key components to purposeful practice that I have adapted for us Scream Writers.
- Purposeful practice has well defined, specific goals – This means that we have to know what it is we want to improve and how we can measure that improvement. Perhaps you want to write more words a day, you can set a goal, say 500 words, and strive to hit that. Or, perhaps you know that your dialogue is clunky. Then you can set your goal at improving your dialogue, “Today, I will write a scene where character A tells character B that she is pregnant but never uses the word “pregnant” (to train talking around the issue) or “I will write dialogue that sounds natural when spoken out loud.”
- Purposeful practice is focused – This is a major difference between traditional practice and purposeful practice. Just writing is not good enough. You have to give it all of your attention, think about why you have written what you have, and understand your choices as you are making them. Then go back afterwards and examine them, see if there is anything you did that you think you should have done differently, and keep an eye out for the parts of the process than trip you up.
- Purposeful practice involves feedback – Feedback can be from the self but this kind of feedback can only take you as far as your knowledge and perception already are. The most useful form of feedback is found from others, particularly those who understand what you are trying to achieve and have experience with it. For the Scream Writer, there are fellow writers or script consultants & coaches (like myself).
- Purposeful practice involves getting out of one’s comfort zone – If you are already great at writing dialogue, then you won’t get much out of practicing writing dialogue. But if you are bad at it, then getting outside of your comfort zone to focus on it is the key to achieving results. When we strengthen our weaknesses, we drastically improve our skills.
A well rounded writer is one that has identified their weaknesses (through feedback), set goals on what they would like to improve, stepped outside of their comfort zone, and stayed focused through the process. These four components are the key to leveraging the most out of your Scream Writing practice. What areas of your writing are you going to purposefully practice next?
