On copying the masters

How deliberate practice could boost your creative writing

Many years ago during my visual arts training, my tutors would make us spend hours copying the works of the master artists.

As a young artist, I always found this frustrating. I didn’t want to make an exact replica of a drawing by Picasso, thanks very much! I wanted to spend every possible moment working on my own art, drawing and painting and sculpting the things that mattered to me.

But looking back, I’m glad the tutors made us do those exercises. It made us get under the skin of a work of art. We didn’t just look at art, we developed a bodily understanding of the techniques and materials that made it a success.

And this tuition definitely worked — after a year, I could draw with absolute confidence, and it became easier and more fun to work on my own projects.

Learning to write is different

In my experience, learning to write has been very different.

I’ve taken a slightly embarassing number of writing workshops over the last fifteen years, and I’ve curated and taught them too. I’ve spent hundreds of hours analysing books and other texts closely. But somehow, I’ve never felt that confidence that I once felt about drawing.

Fifteen years. Compare that to just one year of studying drawing!

I know I’m not the only one to feel this way. So far this week I have had three e-newsletters from accomplished writers I admire, admitting to a lack of confidence in their writing.

Something I’ve noticed is that when it comes to learning to write, we don’t always close the gap between analysing the masters and writing our own pieces. We rarely imitate expert writers on the sentence level, where we can really get to know the materials and techniques they’re using. Often we write ‘inspired by’ or ‘in the style of’, but we don’t often copy.

Now, I really hate a prescriptive writing exercise. I don’t like feeling too constrained, or that my effort is going towards creating a second-class copy of someone else’s work, rather than a first-class version of my own.

But isn’t that just the same frustration I felt while learning to draw?

Perhaps we writers could close the gap in our learning by copying the masters.

Hello, deliberate practice

Deliberate practice is increasingly referenced in writing circles. It’s one name for how my art tutors taught me to draw: through targeted, repeated practice, with frequent feedback.

This kind of practice is common in other disciplines. Think of practicing scales when learning to play a musical instrument, or of reps and drills when you’re training in sport. They may not be as fun as playing a full game or concerto, but they’re essential for building and maintaining skill, and help you to progress more quickly.

Even some writing disciplines use the deliberate practice formula. Trainee journalists and copywriters, for example, receive frequent feedback on shorter pieces, before they progress to writing the bigger stories.

Key to deliberate practice is the idea that it’s better to try, fail, and try again on a series of short exercises. It’s about taking more smaller steps rather than fewer big ones, giving us more opportunities to make improvements.

However, we creative writers tend to seek feedback on a longer pieces — a full short story, for example, or even a first draft of a novel. Perhaps if we embrace deliberate practice, writing and seeking feedback every 500 words instead of every 5000 or 50,000 words, we might see results more quickly.

Cue my flash prose challenge

It’s with this in mind that I have set myself the challenge of reading and writing 52 pieces of flash prose during 2025.

During the challenge I’m going to be absorbing all I can of the flash form, which is usually taken to be a complete story of 1000 words or less. I’ll be reading closely and then writing closely, too.

How do brilliant writers start and end a scene or story? What kind of sentence structures are they using? How do they create three-dimensional characters? How do they write realistic dialogue that keeps the story going? It’s these and other questions that I want to read for, before trying the techniques out in my own writing.

And yes, I will be copying sentence structures, patterns of dialogue, and ways of opening and closing a piece. I’ll be using my own words, but putting them into shapes that other writers have used to proven effect.

And because each piece will be 1000 words or less, I’ll have those small steps towards improvement that I wouldn’t get from just diving blindly into a second draft of my novel-in-progress straight away. That’s the plan, anyway!

If you’d like to try out deliberate practice in your own writing, follow or join in the 2025 flash prose challenge, or keep up with more of my reflections on reading, writing and growing, then click that big green button below:

Next time, I’ll be sharing my recent reading, including some brilliant flash pieces you can read online for free.

Until then, I wish you happy writing.

Flo

Image: Jianxiang Wu on Unsplash