How the Mastery Path was Born: a bio

One hot August night, about twenty years ago, as I sat in my Somerville apartment listening to the radio broadcast of a Red Sox game, I had a startling thought: a revelation. For more than ten years I'd been a teacher of writing. My students were a varied lot: undergraduates at Boston College, graduate students at Harvard Divinity School, working adults at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and other venues. In all my classes I used a recently developed teaching method, pioneered by Peter Elbow and others, a method known as "writing process."

In my early years of teaching, I had been an ardent devotee of this approach, but now my enthusiasm was waning: "Writing process" wasn't turning my students into better writers. What was wrong? I'd been wrestling with that question for months.

Now, as I listened to the familiar voices of Red Sox announcers Joe Castiglione and Jerry Trupiano, that question was replaced with another: How do major-league baseball players get so good? The answer came immediately: through practice. How do professional musicians get so good? Through practice.

Practice…the word echoed, re-echoed, in my mind, leading to yet another question: So, if practice is the way professional athletes and musicians get so good, why can't writers develop their skills the same way? And--even more important--why don't they?

The game forgotten, I grabbed pen and paper and began exploring these questions. Those scribbled notes were the first step on a path of discovery that has continued to unfold for over twenty years. At that time (the late 1990s), I had never heard of Professor K. Anders Ericsson, whose research on expertise development would change my life. At that time, I was completely on my own, a frustrated writing teacher trying to figure out how to teach writing more effectively.

Some of my questions were easier to answer than others: Why don't writers develop their skills the way athletes and musicians do?

The answer to that question is simple: Writers don't develop their skills through practice because no one teaches them how to do it. In the fields of sports and music (as well as dance, visual art, theater, martial arts, and many others), there's a long tradition of learning through practice. Teachers and coaches are always men and women who learned their skills through practice, under the guidance of their own teachers. No one would dream of learning baseball from a coach who'd never played the game, or visual art from someone who'd never painted.

But in the world of writing, teachers are not required to have a command of writing skills. In fact, it's a rare teacher who even thinks of writing as an activity demanding certain skills. Teachers of creative writing are much more likely to call what they're doing "developing talent" or "teaching young writers to express themselves," while their academically minded colleagues are busy teaching "the five-paragraph theme" or "the academic paper."

Having taught both creative and academic writing, I resisted the distinction traditionally made between the two. I wanted to find a model of writing that would encompass all kinds of writing, not focus exclusively on one genre. I investigated all the writing how-to books I could find, I kept reflecting on my questions, I persistently tried out answers in writing--a process that took, not days or months, but years.

My first task was to figure out exactly what "writing" (as practiced by professionals) is. (I would later learn that those who research expertise call this task defining the domain.)

My eventual answer: To write means to do a certain kind of work--the work of communication on paper. Some writers may want to communicate ideas or opinions or facts; others may prefer stories and characters and images. But in all cases, a writer's work is to use language to transfer--successfully-- what's in her mind into the mind of at least one other person.

While aware that others might not agree with my view, that professorial voices might carp, "But what about Joyce or Woolf? What about Foucauld?" I refused to listen to them. As far as I was (and still am) concerned, the voices of academics, of intellectuals, have no relevance to the people I want to teach: ordinary people who want to write better.

My second self-imposed task was to identify the skills expert writers have. That was a tough one, demanding a lot of thinking, and producing pages full of notes: come up with things to say…use the rhythms of English…what about grammar?…organization is key--how do professional writers do that?…not be afraid of readers…use memory… The lists went on and on. Eventually (and aware that other teachers and writers might create different models), I decided that writing skills could be grouped into two main categories: content skills, and craft skills. I knew that there are necessary skills outside of those categories--a command of English grammar, for instance, and a command of one's chosen genre--but many books already existed to help aspiring writers with those particular skills.

So I decided to concentrate on content skills and craft skills.

I had spent many years of my teaching life helping students learn content skills, the ones all writers must have in order to come up with ideas and materials for pieces of writing. Now, for my third task, I had to refine my view of these necessary skills. Curiosity--that was one essential skill; observation, another. And imagination, the ability to mentally picture things or people not actually present to our senses--that was certainly another. After much thought, I decided that the ability to establish a natural relationship with readers--to write to them, not for them--was also a content skill.

My fourth task--and the most enjoyable--was to invent practices to help aspiring writers build each skill. Choosing one content skill, I'd invent a practice, try it out myself, reflect on how it went. Then I'd bring it into the classroom and invite my students to try it. Their comments and questions helped me refine each practice to make it more useful.

I began to envision a book, for beginning and struggling writers, one that would help them train, through practice, their basic content skills. I thought that such a book would equip them to benefit from a genre-focused instruction book; how to write a fantasy novel, for instance, or a memoir. After more drafts and re-writes than I care to remember, the book was published: How to be a Writer: Building Your Creative Skills through Practice and Play (Writer's Digest Books, 2005).

And then--what about craft? I thought about that, too, even while writing about content skills. Writing craft, it seemed to me, has two main components: "large" craft, and "small" craft. Large craft is essentially genre: how a novel works, for instance; how an essay works. I didn't feel drawn, not then, to exploring those skills--and besides, the market was glutted with how-to books about novel- or memoir-writing.. But small craft, the choosing of words and arranging them into effective sentences--now that aspect of writing fascinated me. So, while writing How to Be a Writer, I'd also begun teaching MFA students at Lesley University two essential elements of small craft: diction and syntax. My mind was full of thoughts about writing expertise and how to gain it through practice.

Then a chance encounter with another new book changed my teaching life forever.

The book was called Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everyone Else, written by Geoff Colvin, a Senior Editor at Fortune Magazine. Browsing one day in a Cambridge bookstore, I was drawn to the book by its title. I picked up the book, opened it at random-- and read this sentence: The factor that seems to explain the most about great performance is something the researchers call deliberate practice.

Practice! I almost shouted the word aloud. Why, that's what my book's all about!

Colvin introduced me to a field called "expertise studies," where research scientists ask the question: How do certain people become really great at what they do? The answer is not, as we might assume, innate talent. No one, the researchers have found is "born great" at some activity. Instead, those who become great train their skills, under the guidance of experienced teachers, and using a certain kind of practice: intentional, highly focused, and very hard work. I was enthralled: Here was a body of research that supported my own intuitive, embryonic ideas about how to teach writing. Here was the scientific proof I needed that I was on the right track!

I began giving talks on what I called "the talent myth," introducing writers and others to Colvin's book. I wrote articles and blog posts about it. And I read everything I could find about the man Colvin featured-- the world's leading expertise researcher, Professor K. Anders Ericsson. From him I learned even more about the kinds of practice that turn ordinary people into experts, about the details of the training regimes they follow.

I incorporated my new understanding of expertise into my Art of the English Sentence course and into the drafts of what would become my second book: Spellbinding Sentences: A Writer's Guide to Achieving Excellence and Captivating Readers (Writer's Digest Books, 2015).

To produce, first the course and then the book, meant that I had to once again go through the process of identifying skills and inventing practices. I had to do those practices myself, not just once, but countless times. I loved this practicing even more than I had once loved the content-producing practices of focused freewriting and writing to an imagined audience. I loved not feeling pressured to produce a finished piece. Instead, I was free to concentrate exclusively on words, and on all the ways they can be combined to make English sentences. Sometimes when I described what I was doing to another writer, he or she would say, "Oh, that's just grammar." But it isn't.

Grammar is rules; diction and syntax are tools. Tools to make your meaning clear. Tools to control a reader's intellectual and emotional responses to your words. Tools to create drama, suspense, the illusion of authentic experience. Tools to use the sounds and rhythms of English to make verbal music. Tools so powerful they can enable you to do anything you want with the written word.

After months (or was it years?) of practicing diction and syntax techniques, I could literally feel my brain changing. Now, when I worked on a piece, the words I needed came to me more easily. Now, when I composed a sentence, I was aware of options. Now, instead of feeling stuck or bewildered mid-paragraph, I could draw on a large repertoire of structures, from simple kernels to free modifiers, from nominative absolutes to compound-complex sentences: They were all lodged firmly in my writer's mind, ready for use as needed.

And now, with all these craft techniques mastered, I experienced a radical, a profound transformation. I'd been writing since childhood, but now-- for the first time in my life--I knew what I was doing. For the first time, I had confidence in myself. For the first time, the first time ever, I felt like a real writer.

So, it turned out, did my students. And so, when Spellbinding Sentences was published, did those who worked diligently through the book, making the techniques it offers their own.

At just about the same time that Sentences was published, Anders Ericsson came out with a book designed to bring his knowledge of expertise to a general audience. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, co-authored with science writer Robert Pool, explains how expertise acquisition really works, with evidence from the scientific studies performed by Ericsson and his colleagues. It's a book that will prove to you why the conventional views of writing ability are totally wrong, and it will show you how you, too, through dedicated practice, can change your brain and learn the skills you need. Peak gave me language to describe some of the things I'd been doing intuitively: devise a mental representation of my "domain"; break large skills down into their component skills and practice these separately before bringing them together; imitate models of excellence; be my own teacher. It's an exceptional--and exceptionally important--book; I urge you to read it.

By the time I read Peak, I had put together a number of resources for aspiring writers; in addition to my two books, I offered free writing lessons at www.wherewriterslearn.com (they're still there), and, as an introduction to the subject of learning through practice, a free download. That document needed a title. "The Mastery Path for Writers" sounded good to me, so I used it. Eventually, with a third book in progress, I decided perhaps I needed a name for my approach to teaching writing, one that would also fulfill book publishers' insistence that every writer have a brand.

"Branding" authors (are we cattle?) is a loathsome concept, but I do like having a simple way to describe how I teach. And so "The Mastery Path for Writers" is now shorthand for "Barbara Baig's innovative, practice-based approach to learning writing skills."

More years than I like to remember have passed since that night a baseball game nudged me onto the path to mastery. I had no idea, way back then, of the intense, frustrating, wildly exciting learning journey I was about to undertake. I'm certainly no master writer, but I've learned more about writing and teaching and learning than I could ever have hoped. Even more important to me, as a teacher, is that I've been able to pass on what I've learned to others, some of them aspiring creative writers, others ordinary people who'd just like to be able to communicate better. My greatest satisfaction in life has always come from enthusiastically learning how to do something, and then passing along that know-how to others.

I hope you will find your own way onto the Mastery Path, and that it will bring you as much excitement and satisfaction as it has brought to me.

—Barbara