About the Mastery Path

THE MASTERY PATH FOR WRITERS

Skills—not talent, heart, or digging deep into your psyche—are what separate the pros from the amateurs. And here’s the good news: in writing—as in baseball, music, business, or any other field—those skills can be learned.

In sports, in painting, in music—nobody expects to achieve professional results without years of learning skills. Yet, somehow, these days, in the world of creative writing, aspiring writers are simply told: “Go write.” It’s advice that has doomed countless thousands to frustration, despair, and the wasting of enormous amounts of time.

Fortunately, there is another way: I call it the Mastery Path. It lets you set aside the need to produce pages and drafts and instead spend your time learning the skills you must have to write well. This approach is very simple. It’s also very hard work, demanding persistence, discipline, and focus. That’s because learning skills can only be done through dedicated, deliberate, repeated practice. That’s how professional baseball players or opera singers learn their skills. Writers can learn theirs the same way.The Mastery Path is very simple: it’s the road we walk as we learn and develop our skills. A writer and aikido teacher named George Leonard wrote a whole book about the Mastery Path. In it he defines mastery as “the mysterious process during which what was at first difficult becomes progressively easier and more pleasurable through practice.” The Mastery Path, Leonard says, is available to everyone, regardless of age, sex, or experience. “Mastery isn’t reserved for the super-talented or even for those who are fortunate enough to have gotten an early start. It’s available to anyone who is willing to get on the path and stay on it.”

That’s because the Mastery Path is the path of patient, continuous learning. This ability to learn is our most important human characteristic—and it’s available to everyone. So, as you take your first steps onto the Mastery Path, keep in mind that you are embarking on a journey of learning. Don't expect instant results: Cultivate patience; try to enjoy the journey.Writing, like singing a Puccini aria or hitting a 95-mph fastball over the Green Monster, is a complex skill. Like any complex skill, it is made up of a large number of component skills. I group these skills into two main categories: content skills, and craft skills.

Content skills are the ones you use to come up with material for pieces of writing. To develop these skills, you need to train, through practice, various mental faculties, including your power of observation, your imagination, your subconscious, and your curiosity. If you want to write, but find yourself struggling to come up with things to say, then you will want to do lots of practicing with these faculties. I also include among the content skills the ability to establish a natural relationship with your readers. (The free lessons here will provide you with lots of practices to build your content skills.)Along with the content skills, you need craft skills. There are two kinds: one, the “large” craft skills, involve knowing how your chosen genre works. A mystery works much differently from an op-ed piece; they both work differently from a lyric poem. Most how-to writing books focus on genre: you will have to do a lot of browsing and comparing to find the ones that will teach you the skills you need in a way that’s right for you.
   

The second kind of craft skill I call the “small” craft. This is the ability to choose words and arrange them into powerful, eloquent, spellbinding sentences. For expertise in this craft, you need to train, not your “content-mind,” but your “word-mind.”
  

Anyone can develop expertise in using language, and all aspiring writers should put a lot of time and energy into doing so. That’s because when you have skill with words, you can make magic on the page: you can make people and places and events come alive in your reader’s mind; you can keep your readers spellbound and turning the pages. When you have skill with words, you develop your own distinctive style, your own voice.
   

If you need to develop your skills with language—and almost all aspiring writers do—then I encourage you to immerse yourself in Spellbinding Sentences: A Writer’s Guide to Achieving Excellence and Captivating Readers ( Writer’s Digest Books, 2015). It provides hundreds of practices, tested for years in an MFA Program in Creative Writing, to help you train and develop your word-mind.

Learn more about how the Mastery Path works | Read the story of how the Mastery Path was born