Daily Writing Prompt: Narrative Structure
Craft a new narrative structure from one in nature using this deliberate practice writing exercise.
Writing Skins is a reader supported author newsletter that shares excerpts from an award nominated speculative fiction writer’s craft journals. It offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling.
Prompt School is for the writer who wants to write and learn at the same time. Each day is a new prompt designed using deliberate practice techniques to get you writing and truly embodying different craft skills.
What is Deliberate Practice for Writers?
Deliberate practice is an advanced practice technique to help anyone move from beginner or intermediate to pro level skills through structured and targeted repetition. It may sound off or impossible that there’s a repititive practice that can change your skills simply by doing it, but what sets deliberate practice out from simply repeating an action like learning cursive and calligraphy as a child, is that deliberate practice is structured and targeted.
James Clear defines deliberate practice as,
‘‘Deliberate practice refers to a special type of practice that is purposeful and systematic. While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.”
Deliberate practice was originally coined and study not by a productivity guru but a psychologist Anders Ericsson. The heart of Ericsson’s study was the question: how do experts become experts.
So Ericsson studied and interviewed experts from across a wide range of fields. A commonality in how these experts practiced and learned stood out to Ericsson. Experts don’t just study or watch or read, they perform practice exercises that are targeted at certain skills they are trying to develop.
For writers, deliberate practice looks like starting from a skill you want to learn, practicing that skill in a restricted way, comparing it to work by experts or having an expert review the work, and refining based on feedback. A famous example of deliberate practice for writers is copy work, where a writer rewrites a work of expert writing while reflecting on each sentence, paragraph, and scene for what it is doing and why it works.
Let’s say you want to get better at writing setting descriptions, you could do a number of repetitive exercises like:
Go to different places in the real world and describe the scene in words
Rewrite scenes from published work and screenplays where the descriptions do what you want your descriptions to do
Write a scene describing a setting from multiple points of view (POVs)
Once you complete a set number of these practices, share your results with a skilled professional to get feedback on what you’re doing well and what you’re still struggling with. If you don’t have an expert to look over your work, then examine it against other works from skilled writers to see what they are doing and what you’re not doing.
This type of self-evaluation requires you to be your own editor and critic. That means if you look at what you’ve done and what an expert or professional in the field has done and don’t see a difference, don’t settle and try to think critically about the words the expert uses, the types of sentence construction at play, and where your writing is lacking.
Intention. Practice. Reflection.
The flow of deliberate practice is to set your intention (what skill you want to learn or develop), practice this skill with restraint and focus (repeat practice of the skill under a constraint like time, word count, or specifics), and reflecting and sharing what you learned to repeat the process.
Narrative Structure Writing Prompt
Take a structure or pattern from nature you connect with and write a short story that replicates it.
How to Do This Writing Exercise
The Restraint: Keep the short story under 5,000 words.
The Instruction: Pick a pattern or structure in nature that you have always connected with or that resonates with you currently. Study the pattern by reading into it, maybe watching a video or documentary on it. If you can sketch or like to, draw the pattern out and name the various structures and their purposes. Then take what you know about this nature pattern and craft a narrative structure that is similar or replicates it. Using the example of the structure of a nerve plant leaf, a narrative could look like one through line plot with several subplots that branch off and than smaller mini plots. In a short story, that could look like a story about a person following the consequences of their actions as they trickle out across the story’s world.
The Help: Share an excerpt from your story in the comments and explain the pattern you choose and how you tried to replicate it in your story’s narrative structure. I will provide insight on weaknesses and strengths and create an additional personalized exercise to help you deepen your craft.
Did you do this writing exercise? I’d love to read what you came up with.